Anyone re-program a Steves HurricaneX?

[oreo57]

Have a friend trying to re-program it but can't get the new program to upload.
I'm only the middle man in this so not too technical please.

current firmware seems to have some minor issues on PWM pins 8 and up..

The way the bug is, as it goes through sunrise or sunset it fixes it all, but if you play with it during night or day periods the settings don't get corrected unless you reenter that specific led's(only #8-16) settings in setup which is a total pita.

[mcgyvr]

Using the arduino IDE?
Got the FTDI cable?
Getting errors?

[oreo57]

Their instructions are basically connect to ftdi and you can flash it but I've tried EVERYTHING 3v signal, 5v signal, rts -> dtr dtr -> dtr I can never get any kind of response of any kind from the device.
It gets power and everything but I can't send to it whatsoever and the only thing I haven't tried is reloading the bootloader (over ftdi to a smd atmega328... I'd rather cut my balls off with a spoon.)
I didn't try specifically changing serial.download_rate (it doesn't exist in the default preferences.txt) but I did try running avrdude directly from the commandline and specifying baud 9600 and it was no different... I guess I will try looping the ftdi device to itself and seeing if the rx/tx pins are working at least? But I'm stumped...

I don't really seem to get any response from the serial monitor, "get board info" doesn't really work... I got some information about the chip using avrdude without trying to send a .hex file, but it also never got the expected responses...