Can no longer upload to a Nano, UNO and MEGA are OK

I use Raspberry Pis to load my Arduinos and have over a dozen Nanos and several UNO and MEGA controllers. I have uploaded to the Nanos for several years and recently bought a R Pi 400 and lately I notice I can no longer upload to a nano, not from either R Pi 3 or the 400, or even from a PC! The error I get it multiple "stk-500_getsync() attempt, not in sync" This does not occur with UNO or MEGA, just the Nanos. Even the lowly Blink sketch has this error as I said on all platforms. I have updated the IDE lately and haven't tried a nano since then, could something in the later IDE be the problem? I"m lost, Help!

Welcome to the forum.

Could you show a photo of you Nano board and also a photo of the backside ?
Do they show as a Serial port in the Arduino IDE ?

The Nano has a few things that are different:

  • There is a diode from the USB 5V to the board. That means the board runs at 4.5V (when powered with a USB cable). The 4.5V is no problem, but if you have a cheap USB cable, then there could be too much voltage drop.
  • It has more trouble with non-standard usb-serial chips. There was a FTDI counterfeit and driver problem years ago. If you have Nano boards of 8 years old, you might have no other option then to get rid of them. Some background info here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU66as4Bbds
  • It is missing a protection diode to prevent that the /RESET pin goes into High Voltage programming mode. Therefor it is more likely that the bootloader will be corrupted.
  • It has no buffer between pin 13 and the led. Pin 13 behaves different than a normal input pin.

Could also be the " old bootloader" thing.

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Try double tapping (depending on the type of Nano board) the reset button fast and check the status of the onboard "L" LED. If the onboard LED fade in and out slowly (pulsating), upload an example sketch (Blink LED) from the IDE to the board.

This only applies to the Nano 33 IoT and Nano 33 BLE boards. If you are using the classic Nano or Nano Every, there is no special treatment of a double reset and the LED will never pulse.

The LED will do a regular blink after pressing the reset button on the classic Nano. If it has the "new" bootloader, it will blink quickly three times. This blink can be used as an indicator of whether the bootloader is present on the board.

But anyway, I think ZX80 guess correctly. Select Tools > Processor > ATmega328P (Old Bootloader) from the Arduino IDE menus and then try uploading again.

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