Trouble loading code to Arduino board from Mac OSX Mavericks

Question

I have an Arduino Uno and code was loading fine yesterday but today I am consistently getting the following error (shown by setting the upload section to verbose)

avrdude: Version 5.11, compiled on Sep  2 2011 at 18:52:52
         Copyright (c) 2000-2005 Brian Dean, http://www.bdmicro.com/
         Copyright (c) 2007-2009 Joerg Wunsch

         System wide configuration file is "/Applications/Arduino.app/Contents/Resources/Java/hardware/tools/avr/etc/avrdude.conf"
         User configuration file is "/Users/seanwhipple/.avrduderc"
         User configuration file does not exist or is not a regular file, skipping

         Using Port                    : /dev/tty.usbmodemfa131
         Using Programmer              : arduino
         Overriding Baud Rate          : 115200
avrdude: Send: 0 [30]   [20] 
avrdude: Send: 0 [30]   [20] 
avrdude: Send: 0 [30]   [20] 
avrdude: ser_recv(): programmer is not responding
avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding

avrdude done.  Thank you.

I went to the Arduino troubleshooting website and updated my drivers and made sure the connection was good. I also reset the board. The drivers I have available are /dev/tty.usbmodemfa131 and /cu/tty.usbmodemfa131.

Any help is greatly appreciated

Answer 1

this guy, glenn west, summed up the solution very well. http://3dwest.blogspot.de/2013/12/arduino-in-osx-109-stk500recv.html

since mavericks apple provides his own ftdi-driver, which interferes with the one from the ftdi-site. you have to deactivate apple ones and reinstall the old ftdi-driver. glenn west description likewise.

in my case there was still trash in the bootloader of former failed communication attempts, which killed the communicationprocess... but standard-arduino boards have an reset-button to clean-up the bootloader. so probably u have to do this one time.

Answer 2

There is a chance you have damaged the boot loader. I did this by overflowing the memory on my board which wrote bytes into the whole of the program space including the boot loader.

To get around this you have to "burn the bootloader" there are a number of tutorials listed at http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/ArduinoCoreHardware. I had to make a special cable and use an old PC with a serial port to do this.

Answer 3

i had a cheap arduino clone from china and had the same problem.

for me the solution was installing this CH341 Serial Driver for Mac