Trouble loading code to Arduino board from Mac OSX Mavericks

Question

I have an Arduino Uno and code was loading fine yesterday but today I am consistently getting the following error (shown by setting the upload section to verbose)

avrdude: Version 5.11, compiled on Sep  2 2011 at 18:52:52
         Copyright (c) 2000-2005 Brian Dean, http://www.bdmicro.com/
         Copyright (c) 2007-2009 Joerg Wunsch

         System wide configuration file is "/Applications/Arduino.app/Contents/Resources/Java/hardware/tools/avr/etc/avrdude.conf"
         User configuration file is "/Users/seanwhipple/.avrduderc"
         User configuration file does not exist or is not a regular file, skipping

         Using Port                    : /dev/tty.usbmodemfa131
         Using Programmer              : arduino
         Overriding Baud Rate          : 115200
avrdude: Send: 0 [30]   [20] 
avrdude: Send: 0 [30]   [20] 
avrdude: Send: 0 [30]   [20] 
avrdude: ser_recv(): programmer is not responding
avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding

avrdude done.  Thank you.

I went to the Arduino troubleshooting website and updated my drivers and made sure the connection was good. I also reset the board. The drivers I have available are /dev/tty.usbmodemfa131 and /cu/tty.usbmodemfa131.

Any help is greatly appreciated

Answer 1

this guy, glenn west, summed up the solution very well. http://3dwest.blogspot.de/2013/12/arduino-in-osx-109-stk500recv.html

since mavericks apple provides his own ftdi-driver, which interferes with the one from the ftdi-site. you have to deactivate apple ones and reinstall the old ftdi-driver. glenn west description likewise.

in my case there was still trash in the bootloader of former failed communication attempts, which killed the communicationprocess... but standard-arduino boards have an reset-button to clean-up the bootloader. so probably u have to do this one time.