EMERGENCY! RA+ bricked 15 hours before my flight!

Basic / Standard Reef Angel hardware
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gaberosenfield
Posts: 89
Joined: Thu Mar 08, 2012 5:11 pm
Location: Redwood City, California

Re: EMERGENCY! RA+ bricked 15 hours before my flight!

Post by gaberosenfield »

Ok, I finally got it working. I booted into windows on my macbook pro and tried uploading to my RA+ from there. It worked when I tried uploading an example code, but then had the same error as before when I tried uploading my code. After that, when I tried uploading the example code again, it wouldn't work. But arduino in windows gave a different error. It said "COM3 is already in use". I googled "COM3 already in use arduino windows 8". The results I got suggested that this was a pretty common error and that you need to either restart your computer or try switching to a different USB port. I did the latter and was able to upload an example code again.

I decided there must be something about my code that was causing this COM3 in use error to occur and brick my RA+. I went through and deleted all the unused variables in my code (remnants of past incarnations of my code that I never completely deleted) and commented out functions that I'm not using at the moment. I tried uploading again and VOILA! It works!

I don't know exactly what in my code was causing this error, but the COM3 error only appeared on arduino in windows, not in OSX. I also don't know why whatever was in my code that caused this never caused it before. All I changed from the last time my code worked to when this error started was I changed a timeout for one of the pumps in my automatic water change system from 30 minutes to an hour. I have no idea how that resulted in the COM3 error appearing.

Anyway, everything is working again now and I can finally breath a huge sigh of releif :-) Thank you Roberto for your help!
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lnevo
Posts: 5430
Joined: Fri Jul 20, 2012 9:42 am

Re: EMERGENCY! RA+ bricked 15 hours before my flight!

Post by lnevo »

Very odd. The code should have NOTHING to do with your com port.
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