Reef Angel Forum

It won't seemingly boot up, and the status light just blinks.

I've tried resetting to the standard code, but the upload never starts.

This happened while doing an upload - I'd gotten a serial error as near as I remember. I was moving pretty fast and might have done something stupid like jerked a cable out, I really can't remember. I really have no excuse, I usually know better than that, but had to be on the road about 6 hours ago ...

I took the case off and noticed there's a few buttons - is there any way to 'make' it upload something?

== John ==

Make sure you have the correct serial port and board settings on menu Tools.
If those are correct and you still can't upload, you may want to send it back to be checked out.

Oh, I did, I grabbed the unit from work and plugged it in, and it worked fine. Good thing I had two

Menu settings are all correct, but the unit just blinks. No display, no nothing.

So that's the only option, there isn't a reset key or something? I haven't looked at the board files yet, but I'm pretty handy.

I was going on vacation, so I had to tell a guy at work to put a cup of water in my nano every day as I ripped that unit out and put it on the home tank, lol. I brought the bricked unit with me so I could try to troubleshoot.

== John ==

No ideas? Bummer. Going to check the board files.

I just recall something I read in the past.
Try this:
Click upload on Arduino. When you see the message Rebooting Reef Angel controller, press the reset button inside the head unit and hold it down.
Does it load the code?

Thanks Roberto

This is really weird. I managed to get it to work. I was reading the avrdude docs, and saw it can do some pretty low level stuff, so I ran the serial monitor. Typed a few chars, nothing happened.

So, on a whim, I tried to reprogram it again. THIS time I was using the USB power connection on T-1.

Rather to my surprise, I saw AVRDude writing to the device; turned around, and it had rebooted!

Is there a difference from power through the D-9 and the USB connect?

I must have tried reprogramming multiple times last Saturday - I had to cancel vacation partly due to this issue (and to be fair, partly to the renegade raccoons in the back yard that unscrewed a sprinkler valve!)

No. there should be no difference.
Now that you confirmed you can upload it with the usb power cable. Are you not able to upload at all if connected to the relay box?