Hi all.
Found a couple posts that had my issue but none of them worked in my case.
PC is not fully recognizing the board in the com port section. It shows only Com 4 and no board info.
I’ve verified by the chip it needs the CH340 drivers and have downloaded and installed.
In Device Manager, it shows USB-SERIAL CH340 (COM4).
In Arduino IDE I chose Arduino Nano for the board, ATmega328P (Old Bootloader)
Port just shows COM4.
I had the same problem with another board, the Nano 33 IoT. That was resolved by choosing the proper Nano board after downloading it through Boards Manager. All the fixes I’ve seen say to choose the Nano board for this one.
Used the cable that came with the board so that is correct.
The error message is: "not in sync" and “programmer not responding”.
I’ve got three boards which I would hope one of them were good so I don’t think it’s a hardware issue. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Addendum: I was playing around and chose Arduino Mini for the board and hit upload and my sketch says “done uploading’ with no errors. Board info still says unknown. The blinking led isn’t anymore. Now I’m really confused! I tried loading the blink example and I’m getting the errors again.
This is normal and expected for the boards that use this type of USB chip. The board recognition features can only work if the board has a unique USB VID/PID identifier.
This is the case with most of the official Arduino boards (such as the Nano 33 IoT) because Arduino has purchased their own VID from the USB Implementers Forum and have customized USB CDC serial port firmware on those boards that presents a unique VID/PID for each board model. However, the classic ATmega328P-based Nano, whether official, clone, and cheap derivatives, use a general purpose USB chip that presents the VID/PID provided by the chip manufacturer. So there is no way for the Arduino IDE to know which might be on the other side of that USB chip, or even whether it is an Arduino board at all vs some random commercial electronics connected to your computer.
Select Tools > Processor > ATmega328P from the Arduino IDE menus and then try uploading again. It is true that most of the cheap derivative board manufacturers still haven't bothered to update their bootloader even 4 years after Arduino made the switch on the official Nano boards, but some of them have, so you should not assume that every Chinese board requires the "Old Bootloader" setting.
Thank you! As I’ve been researching I did see that I wouldn’t see the board info in the port like I see with another nano type.
Playing around, I changed the board to mini and it chose the new bootloader (no ‘old’ one in the list). On three boards, 1 said ‘done uploading’. The 2nd printed a whole bunch of yellow text saying it was successful. The third, which I had already started soldering wires on still gave the previous error. I wouldn’t be surprised if I killed it with my bad soldering, just strange that all 3 boards had the same error at one time or another.
Is there a way to read the contents of the board like in a file manager? I’d like to confirm that it loaded before I hook things up?
Thanks for your help.
Not like in a file manager. You can read the contents of the flash memory on the Arduino board if you like. It is the program converted irreversibly to binary machine code so it won't resemble the sketch. But the upload tool actually does this automatically so you probably don't need to bother. As long as you have the "Verify sketch after uploading" preference enabled in the Arduino IDE File > Preferences dialog, the upload tool does the following on each upload:
Write the sketch binary to the flash memory on the board.
Read the flash memory on the board.
Compare what it wrote to what it read.
The upload will fail if this verification process fails or if the process failed before getting to the verification step. So I think you can be confident that the program is on the Arduino board after you get a successful upload.