I managed (seemingly) to kill two of them.
In both cases, I had tried to upload code which just didn't get there so I hit the reset button on the Spider to get it to load.
The first time this happened I had just changed a hardware extension that I was working on and, although I had actually hit the reset, I associated the problem with the hardware.
The symptoms were that the screen came up with the usual boot-up blah blah and then seemed to "melt" in a computerised form of tunnel vision to what ended up as a "Gray screen of death"
Te upload attempt, and indeed, all subsequent ones failed. I put my hand up fairly quickly and told my client I had killed an expensive chunk of hardware and he smiled and gave me another.
Later I did something pretty similar, couldn't upload, hit the reset.... Gray screen of death.. AARRGGHH
Bob was not a happy chap.
Gadgeteer number three was working still and I took the other ones with me to see a friend who works at MS Paris. One of his guests said "Oh yeah, that happens all the time, just erase it, stick on a bootloader and update the firmware"
Well, we did this and ended up with three happy healthy FEZ Spider units again.
The reason that this seems to happen is that under certain circumstances, that seem to be more often than one would like, the programming voltage for the EEPROM is hit and a few bytes or even bits of firmware memory can be written over. This results more often than not in a total system lockup.
The moral of the story is that if your Gadgeteer seems to be fried, don't make a keyfob out of it or chuck it in the bin until after erasing and uploading a new bootloader / firmware package has failed.
Happy hacking!!
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