How I solved my CP2102 USB to UART problems for a breadboard Arduino

Development Tools IDE 1.x
1

I had put together a breadboard version of an Arduino Uno, and the first problem I had was installing the drivers for my CP2102 USB to UART device.

Solution to that problem: I eventually found, downloaded, and installed the driver from here: http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/Pages/USBtoUARTBridgeVCPDrivers.aspx

After that, I was able to get the Blink sketch uploaded and was happy to see that everything seemed to be working. But, something important came up, and I had to put all my hobby stuff away for the day. I came back to it a few days later, and I was about to go insane because I could not upload anything. Kept getting those annoying sync errors.

Solution to that problem: I disconnected my power supply and connected the USB power from the bridge. (I actually had it wired that way when I installed the correct driver, but I didn't know at the time that this was necessary.)

Everything is just dandy now. Uploading sketches is no longer a problem.

So, I'm not so sure what might be wrong with my normal method of providing power to the board, but it turns out that the USB to UART bridge only works when I have my board power coming from the bridge. Anyone know why this is necessary?

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agent_cooper:
Anyone know why this is necessary?

Forgot to connected the grounds?

3

hello can you post you bread board version ?
i keep getting this
avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00

4

hi,
might be because of any 1 of the reasons
you may not selected the proper board. i am having arduino uno board. so i will choose (tools->boards->arduino uno).
you may not selected proper serial port. i connected to ( PORT ) com8. so i will select(tools->serial ports->com8).
you might not installed proper driver software. so go to (control panel->device manager->ports) if u can find audrino there install it.
if you found some thing else install the driver software then. i am using a printer cable so it will show like cp210x USB to UART bridge. i used the prev link which cooper shared to download driver for UART.
once this is done. you can connect your board and try .

5

This actually worked for me as well. :slight_smile:

6

Thank you for sharing your knowldge

It worked for me to

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Just a quick note about this topic. I purchased a development board and could not get windows to recognized it even though it was getting power (I'd see an LED flash briefly when I'd plug it in). I tried updating drivers and many other things.

I found out that the USB cables (I tried two, one from some cheap rechargable headphones and another from a battery bank ) only have two power wires no data wires. I later tried an Android phone USB cable and everything worked.

Anyway, this was a simple problem that took way too long to figure out. Maybe it'll help someone else who has a bunch of usb cables laying around; beware.

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Hey, I just came here to say the same. In my case, no port detected connecting an ESP32 with a CP2102 chip. Changing the usb cable worked for me as well