I recently got an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense and plugged it into my PC and everything seemed to work fine and all the LEDs came on, on the board. So I tried to upload a program to it just to see if the sensors were working but it did not, it disappeared form the Com ports selection and most of the LEDs on the board stopped working, only the 'on' LED works now.
I may have forgotten to change the board selection in the IDE from the Arduino Uno to the Arduino Nano 33 BLE when uploading the program.
Could it be that I have erased the bootloader on the board as some of my research has suggested? or could it be something else?
I am relatively new to programming Arduinos so any help to get my board working again would be greatly appreciated.
While it is possible to erase the bootloader on the Nano 33 BLE Sense by uploading with the wrong board selected, it is not possible to do so with the Uno board selected. The reason is that the system used to upload to the Uno is very different from that used to upload to the Nano 33 BLE Sense, so the upload process will just fail and the Nano 33 BLE Sense will be unaffected.
The tricky thing about the boards with native USB functionality like your Nano 33 BLE Sense is that the USB code that creates the CDC serial port is running on the same microcontroller as your sketch. This means your sketch code can break the USB code, or stop it from running.
Fortunately, there is an easy way to recover from this situation:
Press and release the reset button on your board quickly twice. You should now see the LED on the board pulsing, which means the bootloader is running. The double press causes the bootloader to run indefinitely (until the board is reset, powered off, or an upload is done), which means you don't need to get the timing of the reset just right.
Select the port of your board from the Arduino IDE's Tools > Port menu. The port number may be different when the bootloader is running so don't assume you already have the correct port selected.
Start an upload in the Arduino IDE.
The upload should now finish successfully. After this, you should be able to go back to doing normal uploads without needing to press the reset button. If you still need to do the reset trick to do uploads after this, the problem may be caused by your code. You can verify this by uploading a simple sketch like File > Examples > 01.Basics > BareMinimum.
I have tried everything that you have recommended. I have also watched at least 5 videos on YouTube and I cannot get anything to compile and/or upload to my Arduino Nano 33 BLE (not the IoT version). I have installed the proper board using the Board Manager. I have opened the BareMinimum sketch and included ArduinoBLE. If I select Tools --> Board Info, I do get the board information, so I know that there is some communication between the Arduino IDE and the Nano 33 BLE. But otherwise, I am unable to compile and unable to upload.
Hi @geometrix. I'm going to ask you to post some additional information that might help us to identify the problem.
Please do this:
If you don't still have the IDE or web editor open with the error present, repeat the process that generated it.
You now need to copy the full and exact text of the output. The procedure for doing this is different depending on which Arduino development software you are using:
Arduino IDE 1.x: Click the Copy error messages button on the right side of the orange bar in the IDE.
Arduino IDE 2.x: Right click on the black "Output" pane at the bottom of the IDE window and then select Copy All from the context menu.
Arduino Web Editor: Click the icon that looks like two pieces of paper at the top right corner of the black console window Web Editor.
Open a forum reply here by clicking the Reply button.
Click the </> icon on the post composer toolbar. This will add the forum's code block markup (```) to your reply to make sure the error messages are correctly formatted.
Press Ctrl+V. This will paste the compilation output into the code block.
Move the cursor outside of the code block markup before you add any additional text to your reply.
I tried compiling/uploading on one of my computers and it takes about 15 minutes for even a BareMinimum sketch to compile/upload. I am using 1.x on that computer and the Copy error messages button does not appear after the long compile/upload.
I installed Arduino IDE on one of my other computers and I have already tried to compile/upload several sketches and it only takes about a minute.
While I have not done this yet, I am going to remove and then reinstall Arduino IDE on the first computer and maybe this will solve the issues.
I do have a few more Arduino Nano 33 BLE questions and I am going to start a new thread.
Was the upload successful? The button only appears after an error.
While you can expect longer compilation times for the Nano 33 BLE due to the need to compile the massive Mbed OS core, 15 minutes is of course not normal.
A common cause of slow compilation is your antivirus software doing an on-access scan. The Arduino IDE creates a ton of short processes during the compilation, so if each of these has to wait to be scanned before running, it slows things way down.
Try TEMPORARILY disabling your antivirus for a single compilation to see if you notice that it makes it significantly faster, then turn the antivirus back on. If the compilation is faster with the antivirus off you will need to adjust the settings of your antivirus to put the appropriate file, folder, or process on the antivirus software's "allow list" so it doesn't interfere with compilation.
Please be cautious about working without an antivirus. This is only about temporarily disabling it for a quick test. If you don't feel comfortable doing that, fine. You can try going straight to configuring the antivirus "allow list" for the Arduino software.
Note that the Arduino IDE does caching during compilation, so subsequent compilations will be faster than the first one. So make sure to not let that throw off your results when you are comparing compilation time.
