MR60

Bricked APM 2.5 ?

Posted by Hugues on February 8, 2014 at 9:59am

Hi,

I have a very strange symptom with my 1 year old APM2.5 board.

I have used it without any issue for the last year. The board was sitting for the last three months in my Octo. Never used it since then.

Today I tried to connect to it via 3DR radio, powering the board with a lipo->"Connection time out" in mission  planner. I looked for every possible cause : cables, configuration, etc.

The radio are fine since I could change the local and remote radio units through the config utility. So that puts the radio out of the loop.

 I then decided to connect directly by USB cable -> Windows looks strangely enough for a driver and does not find it. What the heck...It always worked and the driver was already installed on this PC.

So I tried to reinstall manually the APM driver -> Windows did not want to install it.

Then I realized I had left the lipo battery connected at the same time of the USB cable. I disconnected the Lipo battery. Then Windows found the APM MEga 2560.

For 3 seconds the LEDs turn on on APM when I plug the USB cable but turn off after and the COM ports disappears from the device manager.

Could I have a bricked APM ? What would cause this as between the last time the board worked and now, nothing changed on software or hardware level ?

Should I ship the card back to 3DR for analysis ?

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Replies

  • Developer
    Craig Elder February 13, 2014 at 3:18pm

    The arduino driver is here C:\Program Files (x86)\Mission Planner\Drivers

  • This reply was deleted.
    • MR60
      Hugues February 13, 2014 at 10:58pm

      Hi,

      I have tried to reflash the atmega 2560 boot loader with a USB asp avr programmer and the six pins you mention, via arduino IDE: I get an error. How did you unlocked the lock bit to be able to flash the boot loader?

    • MR60
      Hugues February 15, 2014 at 2:14am

      Hi, I did a reflash of the ppm encoder succesfully, but this did not solve the inability to communicate with the APM board to load a new firmware. No joy...

    • MR60
      Hugues February 15, 2014 at 7:23am

      thx, I tried that procedure from your link. It works until the last of the three avrdude command where I get this error:

      3702863227?profile=originalI don't see what else I could try and this is probably the last confirmation the card is definitively broken.

    • Developer
      Craig Elder February 13, 2014 at 3:22pm
      The Mega2560 on the ardupitot is using the same bootloader as Arduino Mega2560 and  the  Lock Bit "BLB1" has been programmed to "LPM_SPM_DISABLE". This prevents the bootloader from being read/modified, but it will never affect the ability to flash firmware from Mission planner or the Arduino IDE.
  • Thomas the Nerd February 10, 2014 at 10:40am

    Has this APM2.5 board been in storage for long enough, that its installed MAVLink version is simply incompatible with the present version in Mission Planner?

    I'm only asking because I had a problem with MAVLink incompatibility a while back, after pulling a spare board out of storage. I don't recall what that problem looked like though.

    edit: there was probably a MAVLink-specific error message when I had a problem. so this is likely not the same problem.

    • MR60
      Hugues > Thomas the Nerd February 10, 2014 at 1:08pm

      Yes it was unused for at least a couple of months but I doubt my symptoms are the same, because even via USB I can't communicate to the board.

    • Emin Bu > Hugues February 10, 2014 at 2:22pm

      when I connect my half broken usb connector I have to hold it or move it until I hear sound from windows and than not touch it...did u try to connect power to input side with jumper on?

    • MR60
      Hugues > Emin Bu February 10, 2014 at 11:41pm

      Hi Emin, thx for your suggestion. I will try that although I doubt it is the issue because I also tried the ISP 6 pins interface without success. I would really like a hardware diagnostic of this board at least to understand how it broke up (and avoid it for the other boards).

      If anyone from 3DR reads this, could I sent you the card back for analysis?

  • MR60
    Hugues February 9, 2014 at 5:22am

    Here a video I made to explain the problem:

This reply was deleted.