Esplora not showing up in device manager; recommendation on solution?

Hardware Arduino Esplora
1

Hey everyone, I'm rather new to the arduino world so please work with me here.

I have an Esplora and am running Windows 7 on my machine. For the month that I've had the Esplora, I've had no issues connecting and talking to the computer. However, yesterday I was trying to connect a display board. While I was troubleshooting, the IDE informed me that it could no longer find the Esplora. I double checked settings, tried restarting, reinstalling, switched chords and ports, etc, to no avail. While trying to update drivers, I realized that the Esplora was not showing up in the device manager. When I plug it into the computer, it actually recognizes the Esplora and tries to find the driver, but then indicates that the device has been unplugged even though it hasn't (see attached error message). Keep in mind this has happened multiple times with different chords and ports. Throughout the whole time, nothing shows up in the device manager. Also, the power light on the Esplora does indeed come on and the light marked with an "L" also blinks a few times after being plugged in.

From what I've read, this seems like a hardware issue, anyone want to confirm or deny this? I couldn't think of how having the display plugged in incorrectly could have fried the esplora itself, but I'm no expert. A post describing a similar issue on another type of board (Arduino Due Install - doesn't show up in device manager (at all!) - IDE 1.x - Arduino Forum) pointed me to this potential solution: http://arduino.cc/en/Hacking/DFUProgramming8U2 Is there any corollary to the Esplora in all that?

Thanks!

arduinoIssues.png
arduinoIssues.png1328×588 161 KB

2

Bump.

Any thoughts on this?

3

Check the Windows Device Manager in Control Panel. If it is listing an unknown device when Esplora is plugged in, click Update Driver. Point it at your Arduino IDE 1.05 install directory which should have the Esplora driver.

If the lights are still blinking on the board, it sounds like more of a driver issue.

If you have access to a different computer, you could try to talk to the Esplora via the 1.05 IDE on that to ensure it is not a board issue.

4

it seems suspicious it stopped working while attempting to use another serial based peripheral.

Did you try connecting w/o the display?

ie upload sketch w/o display - unplug from computer - plug in display - use device - unplug display to upload sketch later.

Multi-use pins seem to be somewhat commonplace. The esplora may not make a good game controller with display for a computer. But more aimed at being its own game platform, that happens to be able to act as a controller while plugged into a PC (? - unless a display is connected).. I don't have that display - I also got rooked at radio shack on the seeedstudio display that wont work with esplora w/o some significant hardware addition/changes to it.

Also - IIRC you had to do something different if you run the mouse demo and want to upload a new sketch - because of a CDC/HID reason I don't know if I comprehended when I seen it.

5

Which display board did you try? If it was one not 100% compatible, it could have confused or even harmed the Esplora.