Techzone Huxley woes

So my roommate was so unfortunate as to purchase one of the infamous TechZone Huxley kits. We've build the chasis and made a number of recommended modifications listed on the reprap wiki.

What I'm stuck on is the monotronics. We suspect that the Tip/Bed Manager daughter-board is defective. Of course, TechZone is long out of business, and the wiki guide has numerous dead links. The current suggestion is to apparently install old versions for the board firmware and an old version of the Arduino environment. I've tried over and over again to get things set up but I've hit a brick wall as far as progress goes in flashing the FiveD firmware. At each step I tried to match the version numbers of the Arduino IDE to the Sanguino, but it seems every possible combination has failed with unique, incomprehensible output. Granted, I am running in Arch Linux and I might just need to run all of the firmware-setup in Windows to circumvent any mistakes I might be making in installing each version of the Arduino IDE.

TL;DR: Does anyone actually have a working TechZone Huxley with the firmwares provided on the wiki? How the hell did you set up the firmware? Furthermore, is it possible to determine if the board is bad?

So, since the daugther board isn't even fit for being a paperweight, I've been wondering about the Sprinter mod for Gen3. Does anyone have any experience with this process? How much extra stuff would I have to buy just to get this lousy thing to function?

I have a Techzone Mendel, which is just a backup now for the Prusa I printed with it. I'm tempted to offer the tip manager daughter board to you guys if you want it. Is it the exact same board? Not sure if there are variants with this thing.

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Yvan

Singularity Machine

Being under linux should have no affect (imo) to programming the board. I know whenever I am under my linux distro I have to launch the IDE under su privileges though.

I'm not very familiar with the Techzone kit or the "daughter board" but a quick search looks as though the Stepper drivers are soldered onto the board. I recommend not hooking up the board and giving an axis with no motor attached any voltage (for example if you only have the X-axis motor plugged in and accidentally hit the Y-Axis to jog 10+mm) as this was a major road block for me and caused a few of my drivers to burn out. If the components are already burned out, then it looks like you're out of luck and you will need to get a separate controller board as well as the pololu drivers.

Fortunately, I found that by running all the Arduino stuff in Windows let me flash the electronics properly; I suppose I was doing something incorrectly on my Linux setup, but this at least assuages my fear of unusable electronics. I guess the next step for me is configuring everything and actually trying to print!

Thank you all for responding!