Also, I tried following guidelines at:
https://airqualityegg.wikispaces.com/Reflashing+the+AQE+Shield.
using arduino as ISP, but I got the following error:
liz@lizmac:~/citizen_science$ avrdude -c arduino -p t88 -P /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 19200 -U flash:w:railroad.hex
avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding
avrdude done. Thank you