I recently purchased a couple Arduino uno clones. Probably my first mistake. The first one is yellow with the SMD chip and the CH340 serial/USB chip. I am running Windows 10 and it shows up in the device manager as a CH340 serial USB dmegaevice but I fear there is no bootloader installed.
The second one has the ATmega328 in a DIP package and showed up in my device manager as "ATmega 16u2 DFU and I can't seem to find a driver for it. I didn't touch the two pins together that put it in the firmware upgrade mode and it is supposed to leave that mode when unplugged but doesn't.
Any help would be appreciated even if it's just pointing me in the right direction. Ive been at this for hours and haven't made any headway at all.
Many thanks in advance
JerkStore:
it shows up in the device manager as a CH340 serial USB dmegaevice but I fear there is no bootloader installed.
What makes you think that? Is it showing up as a new port in Tools > Port in the Arduino IDE? Did you try uploading a sketch? The driver is at http://www.wch.cn/download/CH341SER_ZIP.html but it may have already installed correctly if it's showing up as a serial port.
JerkStore:
The second one has the ATmega328 in a DIP package and showed up in my device manager as "ATmega 16u2 DFU and I can't seem to find a driver for it.
The driver is located in the drivers folder under the Arduino IDE installation folder. The DFU thing might indicate that the firmware was never installed on the ATmega16u2. I'm sure there's some easy to find tutorials on how to do a DFU on it. The firmware is at {Arduino IDE installation folder}\hardware\arduino\avr\firmwares\atmegaxxu2\Arduino-COMBINED-dfu-usbserial-atmega16u2-Uno-Rev3.hex.
The driver was installed and it shows up in the device manager so I think the driver is fine but when I try to upload the sample "blink sketch" and I get a "no sync" error