Revenge of the dude

It was an intense series of firmware flashes, with full time heading hold followed by another simonk which brakes during idle (MOTOR_BRAKE = 1). Braking during idle finally solved the runaways when the tachometer died when going downhill & made driving in the city a bit easier.

With avrdude installed in /usr/local/bin, the command was

avrdude -e -patmega8 -cstk500v1 -P/dev/ttyACM0 -b19200 -Uflash:w:tp_8khz.hex:i -Ulock:w:0x0F:m

The trick is some point in its history, the dude changed to setting a custom baud rate for all baud rates including 19200, despite the fact that custom baud rates were unavailable in some kernels. It needed a hack to re-enstate the standard baud rate flag.

Also, /dev/ttyACM is non functional in virtualbox. It was functional for a JLINK debugger in native mode but not an Arduino. The arduino only worked for Linux 3.19 in native mode, but only after running another terminal program to initialize it to 19200 baud.

It's disappointing how much no longer works in Linux that used to work long ago. The stack postings for Linux drop off after the 2013 time frame, when smartphones dropped below $100. With waning use of desktop operating systems & programming becoming the fast food service of the 21st century, the desktop is returning to a time when weekly reboots were required.

Phones have always needed Windows 3.1 style dropkicking, but the kind of people who use them & who comprise the fast food age of programming don't care about breaking uptime records like 20 years ago.