Icetube menu broken after firmware reinstall

[nickames]

I received an icetube clock kit for Christmas. Assembly went without a hitch and it worked perfectly. After a few days I wanted to try updating the firmware to change the nine character and remove the leading zero from the hours. I downloaded the sept. 30th firmware, and with only a cursory understanding of how it worked, made some modifications. At the time I thought that if it didn't work I could just reflash it.

Getting the usbtiny isp to program the chip was a hassle. When I connected it to the circuit board (with the tube removed and the usbtiny 5V to target jumper removed) it would not recognize the chip. I removed the chip and put it in a breadboard, connected the usbtiny manually, and it programmed fine. My firmware modification didn't work as expected, so I reflashed the chip using avrdude (as far as I can tell the makefile has no option to flash the chip without recompiling) and the default binaries.

This is were the trouble starts. After reinserting the chip and applying power (without the backup battery installed) the clock behaves normally until I try to access a menu item for a second time. Then for a fraction of a second the clock displays something random on a single digit of the display (like it was frozen midway through multiplexing) and it resets. The 'power on' beep sounds and the display turns on and starts blinking normally. I believe the reset is caused by the firmware freezing and being reset by the watchdog timer.

I suspect the underlining problem has to do with the eeprom. There seems to be some confusion in the makefile whether to use iv.eep (which according to avrdude contains 0 bytes) or iveep.hex (which avrdude says contains 268 bytes). Avrdude has no problem with either of the files.

[nickames]

Problem solved. I replaced the atmega168 and flashed it with the BANNED firmware. Now my clock is working again.