Many of you might have received the same promo offer from codebender that I did. They require your hardware be infected with their code as part of the registration process. I suggest you take a look at the source, which you cannot do until after you register and are infected. It did not go well for me. I will not be going back.
Could you explain in more details, what you mean by “infection”?
I didn’t have any problems!
As you register, they require that they program your device with code they will not show you first, as a condition of registration. I had a TinyDuino that was working fine but died when I let them program it. I had several shields plugged in at the time–my bad–which is probably the cause. Forcing me to take their unknown code as a condition of registration without letting me view it first is what I am calling an infection.
Thanks for your response. It made me take a deep breath, plug in a second TinyDuino with no shields attached and go through their registration again. Fortunately it did not destroy a second TinyDuino. I still consider it poor form to require people to install unknown code on a device as a condition of registration. I am unlikely to use codebreaker because of it.
Hi @dwisehart, this is Vasilis from the codebender team
I’m just reaching out to figure out if there was any issue with you using codebender, and if so, to see how we can fix it. You are definitely right that not showing you the code that will be used, and this is something we need to improve.
However, you can find the code being programmed to your board here. As you can see, it’s a basic Blink sketch, so it really shouldn’t break your TinyDuino. If that happened, then something must have gone terribly wrong, and we’ll need to take a look into that, so please contact us on our Feedback Forum, so that we can take a closer look.
And let me know if there’s anything else I can do. We started codebender to make it easier for Makers and Arduino users to get started and write code, the last thing we would want is for someone to have a bad experience through codebender. This is very important for me personally as well, so please let me know if there’s anything I can do, either here or through a private message, or through our feedback platform.
Let’s get to the bottom of this and figure it out 
Since I see mentioned codebender here, I wonder what compatibility is with Blynk? I am especially interested in the esp8266 standalone, which I do not see listed in codebender compatibility.
Thanks for the reply, Vasillis. And thanks for looking into an option where a registering user could “click here to see the source code for the project we are about to program into your Arduino board, wiping out what is currently programmed there” or some such. All I knew at the time was that my TinyDuino stopped working, so I could not complete the registration process and, worse yet, I had no idea what had been programmed in. I tried running the Getting Started procedure multiple times without success.
My best guess is that a corrupt image got programmed in that disabled interrupts and was not letting the processor listen to the USB shield–but that is just a guess. I have a battery plugged into a TinyDuino that I am developing on, which may have also been a factor.
After I got a second TinyDuino working with codebender, I went back to a locally developed tool to try and reprogram my older bits back into the first TinyDuino. After playing around with the settings I was able to get the first TinyDuino to respond.
I then was able to successfully program the first TinyDuino with codebender. From time to time I do see codebender report a failure to program a TinyDuino, but it (fortunately) does not lock up like the first time. After a failure, if I just program the same bits into the same TinyDuino a second time, the programming works.
That’s all I know,
Daniel
hey @CptanPanic
you’re right, we don’t support the ESP8266 as a standalone Arduino yet. we do aim to do that soon, but for now you con only use it on codebender in conjuction with an regular Arduino board
@dwisehart, this is very strange. it’s almost impollible to break the Arduino (or TinyDuino for that matter) flashing, because it is done partly in hardware (the beard is hard reset), and partly by the bootloader which runs before whatever sketch you have programmed.
If you continue having issues, I would really urge you to contact support. We’ll do anything we can to help you