Redboard Turbo stopped working

Development Boards
1

I have a Sparkfun Redboard Turbo purchased about 3 weeks ago. I have been playing with it, running a number of example sketches. I am looking at moving from our usual Arduino Uno/Mega environment in a college course to using one of the newer boards. I have used the Uno/Mega environment for several years.

So, yesterday I was running an SPI sketch, and suddenly the bootloader? serial hardware? started working strangely. Some of the things happening were:

  1. The sketch would compile in the IDE and start to upload. At that point it appears to hang. The RxTx lights are not flashing, the Big Green LED does not light, and I never see the Autoload message. The IDE never says it completed loading.

  2. The sketch compiles and appears to upload. The Big Green LED lights up, I see the Autoload message. The IDE shows the upload statistics and says “CPU Reset”. I thought I used to get a row of # characters at the end, but I may misremember (I have also been testing an Artemis ATP). The Big Green does not turn off, the sketch does not seem to run. Running a Serial Monitor window just shows a blank window.

  3. Same as above, but the Big Green turns off. Looks like we are ready! However, opening the Serial Monitor is odd; most of the SerialUSB messages do not appear. Only one of the println statements in the sketch loop actually works.

  4. After various restarts the IDE often indicates that the port is busy. Another restart typically avoids that message (but still fails as above).

I tried several sketches that ran fine the previous day. The main one I used (because it was simplest) was a simple sketch to read the time from a RTC on I2C. Other than the Qwiic RTC nothing else is attached to the board.

After each failure I tried various restart techniques; single tap the restart button (sometimes multiple times), cycle power to the board, re-open the Serial Monitor window. At no time can I get the board to work.

I am using Arduino IDE 1.8.5 under Windows 10 Pro. As I indicated, everything worked fine until yesterday.

I assume I have 2 possibilities:

a) the board is fried. Is it typical for a board to die in 3 weeks?

b) the bootloader code is corrupted somehow. I have looked at the disk drive mounted by double clicking the reset button. The CURRENT.UF2 shows it is v2.0.0-adafruit.4.12.g2d4ec73-dirty SFHWRO.

I downloaded a file

Release Winterbloom Binary Star, Silicognition LLC M4-Shim, Adafruit MatrixPortal · adafruit/uf2-samdx1 · GitHub

to my PC drive. I “think” I can copy this file to the disk drive and it is supposed to automatically update the uf2 file, but I am unclear on this process and a bit nervous to try it. Are there instructions somewhere on exactly how to do this? One description I found indicated you had to do it on a Linux system (I am Win10).

I found the article https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/arm-programming which is interesting, although I’m unclear on everything. I went to https://github.com/sparkfun/Arduino_Boa … ders/turbo and downloaded the bin file bootloader-sparkfun-redboard-turbo-v2.0.0-adafruit.4-12-g2d4ec73-dirty.bin as recommended in the article. Apparently I would need to buy the $500 device to install this file? I think I am confusing the uf2 file and the “bootloader”.

I appreciate any help I can get to understand this.

2

Head here https://www.sparkfun.com/returns and fill out the form - we’ll get ya squared away

3

Hi, I appear to have a very similar problem to the one cited here, though my board seemed to quit responding within a few days. I was able to get the Redboard Turbo Blink sketch to run and after tinkering with that a bit, I got ambitious and decided to download my haptic driver and attach the haptic driver board to the RedBoard via a qwiic cable. Almost from that moment forward, I noticed I could no longer upload sketches. Looking closer I noticed that the usbmodem com port that displayed as expected during Arduino IDE setup had changed to a bluetooth port and each upload fails with No device found. I’ve double-checked I still have the Redboard Turbo SAMD selected and I’ve no idea when the original usbmodem port disappeared. I’ve tried two different USB cables (the one that came with the board and one I had at home). Both now only make the PWR LED illuminate. The blue LED, TX and RX LEDs don’t illuminate anymore. Also attempted pressing the board reset button and uninstalling and reinstalling the SAMD dependencies and SparkFun SAMD Redboard Turbo drivers. I’m suspicious because everything was working so well. I’m hoping I didn’t damage a port or the board, but after months of experience with Uno years back that I bought from you, I doubt it would be so fragile.

I wish I’d looked at the usb tree in the system report when it was working. I have vague memories of the controller showing up in Finder when things were working, but not now.

Welcome thoughts,

Jackie

4

I realize I left off a few key points. I disconnected the qwiic cable once I realized I had a problem and all the tests after (uninstalling / reinstalling drivers, trying different cables) was after detaching the qwiic cable and haptic board. Lastly, I was doing this with a desktop Arduino IDE on Mac OS, specifically Big Sur 11.2.2 on a MacBook Pro.