"Bricked" Teensy 3.2 and recovery

Status
Not open for further replies.

genrege

Member
I managed to apparently brick my brand new Teensy 3.2 within hours of getting it. Was coding some I2C stuff on it on Windows. Anyway at some point, Windows wouldn't recognise it, although my other Teensy (also a 3.2) was fine. Symptoms: no COM port associated with it, but it made the USB connect/disconnect sound when the reset button was pressed. Tried all the usual things, e.g. shorting the reset pad on the back of the board, rebooting windows, holding down reset while plugging it in but to no avail. Then checking on these forums, I noticed it was being see in device manager as an HID USB device. Tried uninstalling and reinstall the USB driver, again to no avail (obviously as the other Teensy was fine).

The "fix" was to go to my Mac, install the Teensy loader and upload one of the blink hex files through this. Hey presto, it's blinking away merrily and I'm sure it's all fine now. So much for Windows...

Well, hope this is of use to someone.

By the way, I love this little thing, and thanks to Paul for making and supporting these.
 
That same thing often works in Windows too... at least for me with Windows XP and 8 using Teensy 3.0 and 3.1.
If the program has a bug that causes the Teensy to get stuck in a race condition, where it can't establish communications with the PC.
Just compile the blink program and press the button on the Teensy. It's always accompanied with a sigh of relief.
 
I'm 5 days on my T_3.2 (combined with months old 3.1's under Win 7) - now on Win10. I had some scary times that resolved themselves in Win10 - odd failure to reprogram 3.2's. I have 2 of each connected just now and not seen any trouble last couple days with dozens of small edit uploads. When it was trouble I went through all those steps and it has been fine since. Only odd thing was I use TYQT and had a debug binary to test the T_3.2 ID info for Koromix - and I'm not sure if that got the comms in an odd state perhaps. Using TYQT now with four windows open one to each Teensy watching debug spew and they've been running for days. And since yesterday on the released "Teensy QT".
 
I ran in to more problems with Windows not recognising the Teensy (3.2). Been using a Mac for the last few days, everything works fine there, back to Windows today. I found today that creating a new user account fixes the problem!!

Question is, what's different and how do I restore my main user account back to its former, Teensy-aware glory?
 
Question: did you do an Arduino UNZIP or an EXE install?

If you did an EXE install I'd Uninstall that and do an UNZIP file copy and a fresh Teensy install over that and you may be fixed. Since I started here in Feb I suffered through multiple IDE 1.6.x's and the requisite Teensy updates and many of it's beta's up to 1.25 from 1.20 and I had IDE prior to 1.6 on other AVR devices. Once I started using the UNZIP that all worked better [the IDE has - it seems- some hardcoded expectations on EXE install]. I even made a separate Drive Partition where I now have 1.6.3 and 1.6.5 - so it is not anywhere near 'Documents' or 'Program Files'.

I ran in to more problems with Windows ...

Question is, what's different and how do I restore my main user account back to its former, Teensy-aware glory?

I'm not sure it matters but the VERSION# of windows doesn't show when I read your posts?

Assuming you have some post Windows 95 version you should be able to START RUN:: rstrui

If you can find a System Restore date prior to your first post and first problem posting "09-24-2015, 04:24 PM " that may restore a copy of affected user registry data.

A New User would get a new set of 'user' default registry values - but not sure how that interacts in this case with the Machine settings that would relate to hardware.
 
see post #4

I really mean to try everything you can try. Do not skip something you can try thinking it probably won't work.
From your description, reinstalling teensyduino may fix the issue.
 
Thanks for the replies. It was an EXE install on Win 8.1, and I will try again tomorrow, with the info from #4 and a checkpoint restore if that fails (I have one a couple of weeks old).

So my new dev account is kind of working, every second or third upload onto the teensy loses the serial port and I have to plug the teensy into a different USB port, but at least I'm not using the Arduino IDE on the Mac which is a massive bonus (VS2015+visual micro) :D
 
Good luck - you didn't say where your IDE.exe was installed - or if you have multiple IDE installs - but I suspect doing an uninstall and starting fresh UNZIP and Teensyduino install to "C:\Teensy165" (drive and dir of your choice) might get you a fresh start. Win 8 is my least used system (but used enough on 2 machines to know it works - and issues always work out) I'd do that in any case and rescan the p#4 troubleshoot link - but I don't see much applicable or that isn't dated/unrelated - but you know your context better.

Doing a RSTRUI might be a good first step - as your best restore point may get dumped, and if you do that later your results from the uninstall and unzip install may be compromised. RSTRUI has other affects on installed apps - you may never want to do that. But if you are considering it I'd do that first - then uninstall the IDE and move to unzip and try again with a fresh TeensyDuino install. If you do restore - I not would test it because the one time it works, it may put you back into whatever behavior you did the restore to get away from.

<edit>: I'm not sure what effect rstrui may have on your new user account since created. I do know it takes a given user account back to an old password if changed after the restore point. It may leave that user unchanged, or it may wipe it - though as a test account you may not care either way.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top