[Dimitri]

Hi to all, newbie here

Please can somebody help me as I am going mad.    

I built a 2 lane wooden track about a year ago and opted to use a dead strip for lap counting and timing. All went well for a while until everything went blank, reading between the lines it would appear that I caused a spike in the system when the cars went over the dead strips onto the Arduino. 
For nearly 6 months now I have spoken to many people and the result seems to be that I have damaged the Arduino board. I have since bought several more Arduino boards but my biggest problem seems to be uploading the sketch onto the board, I just cannot get the sketch to upload.
What am I doing wrong.
I have 2 lights on the Arduino which come on when I connect it to the laptop, green and amber, but when I load should the amber light flash?

[Phil Kalbfell]

Does the computer see the boards ?
Are the new boards Genuine Ardunio or clones?
Do you have the right com port selected?

If they are clones the computer will not see the boards without a CH 340 driver.

[woodcote]

Hi Dimitri 

My arduino clone / deadstrip set-up is on another thread here: https://slotracer.online/community/showt...p?tid=2061

I think there’s all the info to help you protect the Ardunio inputs from deadstrip spikes and get the correct driver so you can upload the sketch.

Good luck!