Arduinoos

And this is a strong one!

We are using quite many UNO platforms for fast prototyping. In spite of their relative high price, we always bought boards from Arduino, not because we fear the ‘hall of shame’, but because we understand that that buying these boards contributes to the business model of the Arduino team and helps keeping the heads of this community alive.

So far so good, except for today. We received 6 UNO boards that we bought from FARNELL which is our main supplier. And too bad, only one out of the six boards was working properly!

Connecting a ‘defective’ board through the USB port would systematically trigger the following message:

A known for good board would immediately be recognized, whatever the type (UNO, MEGA, etc.). So what? From the beginning, our assumption was that the firmware on the ATMEGA 16U2 (this little square chip next to the USB port) was corrupted, and we were right! The ATMEGA 16U2 acts as a converter between the USB port and the Serial Communication Port of the microcontroleur (so as to say the ATMEGA 328). It holds some firmware which cares about the conversion.

Upgrading the firmware on the ATMEGA 16U2 is fortunately piece of cake if you follow the next coming instructions:

• Make sure that you run the latest version of Arduino. The IDE has nothing to do with the described action, however, the latest software versions contains the most update drivers.
• Download and install the FLIP software from the ATMEL web site (freeware, no registrations). Here is a link with the FLIP page. My version was 3.4.7.
• Open the device manager and locate the ‘defective’ UNO (My PC is running Windows 7 pro, 64 bits)

• Shortcircuit the two pins from the ICSP connector for a few seconds. The UNO board is now recognized as

• Update the driver for this newly created device: double-click on ‘ATmega16U2’, select the ‘Driver’ tab and click on ‘Update Driver…’

• Click on ‘Browse my computer for driver software’

• The drivers are located in ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Atmel\Flip 3.4.7\usb’, click on the ‘Next’ button

• Done! Now run the FLIP application

• Select ‘ATmega16U2’ in the device list

• Select ‘USB’ in the ‘Communication’ ‘Settings’ and open the USB port

• Load the HEX file from ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\arduino-1.6.0\hardware\arduino\avr\firmwares\atmegaxxu2\arduino-usbserial\Arduino-usbserial-atmega16u2-Uno-Rev3.hex’ and check the ‘HEX file aprsed’ message in the status bar.

• The FLIP main window looks like this:

• Click on the Run button, and here is the updated window of FLIP showing successful execution of the Erase, Blank Check, Program and Verify actions.

• Unplug the Arduino board and plug the USB cable back. The Device Manager shows an ‘Unknow device’ for a little while, finds the driver and finally adds the Arduino board to the list of Ports (COM & LPT)

•  If your computer fails to self recognize the Arduino board, go through the standard procedure for upgrading the Arduino driver.

HTH