I was working today on my little gadget I designed last year. On its first test run last December, it was dropped on the “on/off” switch and broke. The test trials were very short and the project was shipped back to me for what I thought was an easy fix. Well, the switch is fixed, but now the AVR decided to stop communicating with the JTAG interface so I can’t program the beast anymore. Unfortunately, I didn’t design a ISP interface onto the board so I have to tack wire wrap wires to the 4 lines on the Mega128 and hook up my ISP to try to get the JTAG fuse set to re-enable the interface. Well that doesn’t work either – the debug interface says the chip can’t go into program mode. But I checked some pins on the micro with my scope and it seems to be very happy doing something – sending data on the serial interface and flipping bits on the I2C interface like crazy. However the display doesn’t work and I can’t get a firmware boot to load either.
Well that reminded me of Colossus the Forbin Project – my favorite movie when I was 14 years old and I had to pop the DVD into the PS3. Darn old Collossus decided to do its own thing also. Only – it can launch ICBMS and my little ATMEL Colossus can only annoy me.
Here’s the info on this little known movie:
Colossus: The Forbin Project
Eric Braeden, Gordon Pinsent, Leonid Rostoff, Willard Sage, Martin E. Brooks, Dolph Sweet,
An artificially intelligent supercomputer is developed and activated, only to reveal that it has a sinister agenda of its own.