Do you have a cool model railroad-related project or hack? Maybe something involving cool scenery tips, a new way of doing something like block control or model making, or perhaps a little more technology-oriented like using LEDs, various other electronics, computers, CNC in some fashion, or embedded microcontrollers like the Arduino? Well, if you do and you’ve registered as a trackhacker.com member, then feel free to submit your post on our Submit Your Post page using a cool little form with a neat WYSIWYG editor! I’ll review your post and if it gets published, you get credit and exposure and the Track Hacker community grows! Make sure to review the small list of submission rules prior to submitting material. Have fun and I can’t wait to see what you have in store! 
Well, remember from my previous post that I had found an interesting post about Reprogramming the Default FTDI Settings onto the EEPROM built into the FTDI Serial-to-USB chip? Well, the procedure and the FTDI programming utility worked just fine but it did NOT solve my locked up Arduino board problem! Ahhhh! 
has ANYBODY run into this at all? I have been in touch with technical support from MakerSHED (I got the Arduino Duemilanove in a kit from MakerSHED with a bunch of basic electronic components and sensors) and they currently don’t seem to enthusiastic about replacing my board although to be fair, I haven’t suggested it yet but they, at the same time, haven’t offered. I guess at this point it’s getting safe to say that something catastrophic has happened to my Arduino board although I don’t see any obvious component failures (burnt resistors, blown caps etc…). Well, I’m starting to get really bummed here because I have TONS of projects waiting for a working Duemilanove board.
Ok I didn’t end up going with Adafruit and instead ordered a Pocket AVR Programmer and an ATMega328 chip preloaded with bootloader from Sparkfun. It came down to price and the fact that Sparkfun had another item I wanted and Adafruit didn’t. Anyrate, I have received the AVR ISP and the preloaded chip with bootloader yesterday. I popped the preloaded ATMega328 chip into my locked up Arduino Duemilanove board and you know what happened?…….nothing. It’s still locked up. Now I’m starting to get concerned. That tells me that the problem is not simply a corrupted bootloader but something else, perhaps more sinister. I did find an interesting post about Reprogramming the Default FTDI Settings onto the EEPROM built into the FTDI Serial-to-USB chip. Perhaps I somehow managed to erase or corrupt the FTDI settings? No clue. I will try that process later today or tomorrow. I am starting to get really nervous that something bad happened to the board and fried one of the components.
Outwardly, it appears, that I have fried the ATMega328 chip on my Arduino Duemilanove. I had the Arduino hooked up to a CdS photoresistor and the LCD as a quick and dirty light meter (project unrelated to model railroading). It would display the scaled numeric value on the LCD in the top row (16 x 2 LCD) along with a real-time bar graph in the bottom row. It was pretty cool. It worked for about a week with no problems and all of a sudden, for whatever reason – I fired it up one more time and nothing. The LCD backlight came on but nothing was displayed. I checked all of the wiring (it was still layed out with the LCD and contrast pot and the CdS photoresistor on a solderless breadboard) and everything was fine. I double and triple checked the wiring. I disconnected the Arduino from all of the other circuitry and then noticed that when I hit the reset button, it would do nothing – normally it would blink the LEDs. I tried disconnecting it from power, powering it up from USB etc… nothing. So then I try to overwrite my light meter sketch with the Arduino IDE example Blink sketch. Thats when I noticed I could not communicate with the Ardunio at all where I always was able to before. I got the following error messages in the Arduinio IDE:
As an aside to my hack on making a Arduino powered Model Railroad Speedometer, I created a little Adobe Flash calculator that uses the formula from that hack to calculate the scale speed of a model locomotive based on a known distance in inches (sorry I’m not metric yet 
) and the time in seconds it took the train to travel that distance. Simple. I gave it a pretty look and hopefully someone finds it useful. Let me know what you think!
