SparkFun Forums

[craiglindley]

Hello,

I've just purchased a couple of Pro Micro boards and I think I have bricked them both terminally. I believe the problem was caused by my sketch's use of timer1 and/or timer4 in the processor. Somehow with my sketch running on the board, USB no longer works. With USB not working I cannot load a different sketch. Kinda of a catch 22 situation.

I might add that a slightly different version of my sketch runs successfully on my Arduino Uno.

Has anyone else seen this problem?

Can anyone suggest how I might recover my $50 investment?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

[craiglindley]

Hi,

The good people at SparkFun set me straight. I was manipulating the PLL to enable high speed PWM and doing it in a manner
that caused the USB stop working. One must leave PCK at 48 MHz or else USB will not work.

Another thing they told me was you can unbrick a Pro Micro by plugging in the USB cable after you have started the upload.

Hope this prevents others from similar problems.

[DigitalMagZ]

I think I may have the same problem. I got two boards from spark fun and I cant get them to load anything. The Arduino IDE states that there is a write error. I followed their tutorial. I think that my test code included a library that may have altered something that controls USB as you pointed out but I cannot figure out how to "unbrick" them so that I can try loading basic blink code to verify functionality. Im running win 7 64 and Arduino 1.0. How did you unbrick your devices? Windows loads Sparkfun ProMicro bootloader, then un loads it and loads Arduino Leonardo with a COM port that I can see in the IDE but cant write to.

You mentioned plugging in the USB cable during an upload... but it wont start the upload until the after the compile and by then it knows theres nothing attached.

Thanks for your help.

-Ryan

[JoyMonkey]

I had some trouble getting the Pro Micro to work with Windows 7 64-bit too, but eventually I got it going. Eventually I found that an FTDI adapter that I had connected at the same time (I forgot it was even there actually) was causing some kind of conflict that was stopping Windows from assigning a COM port when the time came to upload a sketch to the Pro Micro. When I removed the FTDI adapter the problem went away, Windows was able to install the Leonardo driver and Arduino 1.0 was able to upload. And there was much rejoicing!

[craiglindley]

Ryan,

I unbricked mine by doing as I said. I hit the upload button and it starts compiling I quickly plugged in the USB cable and if your timing is just right, you can load a sketch.

[lemmiwinks]

I hit the upload button and it starts compiling I quickly plugged in the USB cable and if your timing is just right, you can load a sketch.

Yup, this worked for me too. However, I found i had to plug directly into one of my computer's usb ports - it didn't work through my external usb hub. Thanks.

[bugch3ck]

I was worried there for a while.
This trick worked for me as well. I noticed that the driver loaded when reset the device (by connecting the RST and GND pins). Doing that at the right moment during an upload worked for me.

[MNHS]

Unbelievable, but this did the trick for me as well.

For others who will inevitable come to this post because they also searched google for "arduino pro micro brick" (what happened two times for me so far) and this thread came up: Try it! At first it didnt worked for me and I was unsure if this is the correct solution. My Pro Micro was plugged in, but didn't showed up in the menu entry for Serial Ports. Only the power LED was on. The RX and TX LED where off. I sure thought that I bricked mine when I saw this. No Serial Port, no lights except the power LED.

But what can I say, I added a pushbutton to GND and RST and pressed it in the moment I saw the line "Binary Sketchsize: XXXX Bytes..." and after a few tries, two of my bricked Pro Micro came back to life in this manner.

Well... I would have never figured out that by myself. Thank you guys.

I wrote this post with the hope that some of my words will help others while searching for this error and they will come right here because of some word combination.

Tags: arduino, promicro, pro micro, no light, power light, brick, no serial, no response, shown greyed, Problem, resurrect, revive


MNHS

[quantumsized]

Not sure if anyone is still looking at this thread but I have been working on an OLED 128x64 with a sketch that shows time and date with an RTC lib provided by Adafruit and the Wire lib. I made it also show my VCC voltage so as I can monitor it when on battery. There where a few other things I wanted to add but my Pro Mini died on one of the uploads and since then then power LED shows as normal but the other one blinks fairly fast. I am using an FTDI serial converter board (the Foca board v2.2). It has a reset button and a 3.3/5 volt selector. I have tried both settings. Nothing I have tried has helped. It is still recognized under COM port 3 but the compiler says that it is not responding. It literally says: "avrdude: stk500_getsync() attempt 1 of 10: not in sync: resp=0x01
avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding".

Would this be a case to reload the bootloader?
If anyone could help me figure out how with my current hardware, that would be great!
So I currently have for hardware: an FTDI converter, Raspberry Pi, and a Beaglebone Black.

Thanks

[zezba9000]

Tnx this worked for me. If you try to upload a sketch for a 3.3v 8mhz version on a 5v 16mhz device it will brick the thing. Crazy...

Also when you first plug in your device it runs like 8 times as slow as normal until you hit the reset button... these devices dont seem to be to reliable.

[Stugan]

A way to save compile time when unbricking the Pro Micro

I had this problem like the previous users and the compilation on Win10 64bit takes too long for the reset trick. I managed to do the standard reset trick once but got by with just pure luck, but failed to repeat it.

Make sure you have Verbose output in Preferences and do the reset trick mentioned above.

If the trick fails you get a line stating something like

Code: Select all

C:\Program Files (x86)\Arduino\hardware\tools\avr/bin/avrdude -CC:\Program Files (x86)\Arduino\hardware\tools\avr/etc/avrdude.conf -v -patmega32u4 -cavr109 -PCOM6 -b57600 -D -Uflash:w:C:\Users\YOUR_USERNAME\AppData\Local\Temp\buildf29adb609c1bf60e6e2027bbf35678bc.tmp/YOUR_SKETCH_NAME.ino.hex:i

You can run this in a standard command prompt and that will upload the already compiled "YOUR_SKETCH_NAME" from your temp folder without recompiling it. (This saves time in those precious 8 sec) Just make sure to put "" around the two Program Files strings

Code: Select all

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Arduino\hardware\tools\avr/bin/avrdude"

and

Code: Select all

-C"C:\Program Files (x86)\Arduino\hardware\tools\avr/etc/avrdude.conf"

since Windows uses space in the naming. (Or move to the folder and call the avrdude without the long link)

Hope that my 2cent help anyone. :whistle:

//Johan