Hello! I am completely new to all this and this is my first board, so my apologies for any silly mistakes.
Anyway, I have a project involving driving LED's with instructions sent by my PC. It's the only reason I got the board. I have a piece of code that I have to run on it. I have an Arduino Uno, the one with a small, soldered on chip.
When I followed the instructions for installation, everything seemed to go fine. The board's "ON" light is green, and an "L" light is blinking orange. Bur when I go to upload my sketch, I just get an error that no board is connected. There are also no "COM" ports listed in Device Manager. Even with hidden devices enabled.
I had a quick look in the BIOS, but there is nothing about ports. USB is enabled, obviously, since all other stuff is working. I tried different ports, but none of them seem to be recognising the board.
My motherboard is GA-Z270X-DESIGNARE if it makes any difference.
ballscrewbob:
Are there any devices listed in device manager with errors of any kind ?
If it is a CLONE board you may need additional drivers such as these
Try avoid USB 3.0 ports as it can be a hit and miss affair with those.
Try other cables as it is not unknown for cheaper cables to be bad right from the start.
I unplugged all devices other than my mouse and the board, and restarted my PC. There were no errors listed in my Device Manager. The board does the same thing whether I plug it into either of the two 2.0 ports on my mobo, or any of the 3.0 ones.
I'm also pretty sure that it's not a clone, I paid good money for it and got it from a reputable store. Original box that talked about how all the parts are made and tested in Italy.
I tried on my laptop as well, same thing there. No board detected on COM1. And no "COM" listed at all under Device Manager.
COM 1 under windows will NOT be the port for the board.
That is the defacto reserved port for almost all computers.
More likely to be COM 3 or higher.
Make sure there is NOTHING else connected to the board.
Open device manager and expand ports COM & LPT
Plug in the board.
Do you get the new hardware found noise ?
If you do then windows found it and you may see a new COM number appear and that would be your COM port to select in the IDE.
If windows does not detect the hardware then there is a chance it may be dead.
If thats the case do yourself a favour and post mortem. What did you do that could have caused it (shorted wires, too many volts somewhere ?)
Maybe post a picture of the board more especially the chip near the USB port of the board. (a clear one) or the text from the top of that chip would be even better.
It looks pretty obvious that you have another issue with another device further down in your device manager list.
See my first response to this thread as I think yours may well be a driver issue.
ballscrewbob:
Open device manager and expand ports COM & LPT
That is the thing that is not there at all. I have nothing like that in Device Manager whether the board is plugged in or not. It's Windows 10 if that matters.
I also took the board to a friend of mine, and he plugged it into the mangled monstrosity of a PC that he has, but after we installed the Arduino software, the board was actually detected by it. And he did have that ports thing in his Device Manager.
At this point I have two very different Win 10 machines having problem with the ports COM thing, and one Windows 7 where it all works just fine. Could it be a Windows 10 issue somehow?
They are not hidden. I did show hidden devices, the category still didn't appear.
I tried manually adding legacy hardware, under COM ports > Arduino > Arduino Uno, but while that does add a COM ports category with the device, it just gives me an error that the device can't start. It was assigned to COM 3, but changing it to anything else, including COM 1 like in the error in Arduino software, still doesn't do anything. The software still doesn't see it.
If you cannot see ports LPT & COM then you have it hidden. It is there !
The legacy method sometimes works for people too but clearly not in your case.
If you can see the board on COM 3 then that is the one you must select also in the IDE.
Please give a screenshot of the device manager with the COM 3 showing.
Attaching a screenshot of my own windows 10 device manager with a CLONE uno attached
In order to have a clean working platform, I decided to do it on my laptop again since I haven't installed anything on there. I also have a number of virtual machines that are ready to go. Here is what I did:
Plug the Uno into any random free USB 3.0 port.
Download and install IDE on the main Windows 10 install, along with any drivers that it wanted.
Boot up a Win 7 VM.
Download and install IDE on that, along with any drivers that it wanted.
There is the problem right there...
That looks like an MS VM.
Notoriously bad at getting Com ports on.
Went down that route quite a while ago and ended up using VMWARE as it does support serial ports.
But even then it was at best a little flakey on occasion.
Try to avoid VM`s with the IDE.
Simply try a google for Microsoft vm serial port`` and you will probably understand why I moved away from the MS offering.
Problem mostly is the sharing aspect of the serial communications itself.
BTW didnt I say avoid USB 3.0 ports where possible
Have a Poweredge SERVER here and tried quite a few versions of VM's via that too and that is where I figured out the limitations of the MS VM machines in various guises.
Even Hyper V had issues with serial ports.
And certainly dont run the IDE underneath a VM as that in itself may cause other issues with COM conflicts.
The VM layer needs access to the hardware layer so adding an extra layer...well you probably get the idea...
If you only have USB 3.0 ports first test that the ARDUINO itself is seen at the windows 10 level.
If not or it is flaky then inserting a decent powered USB 2.0 HUB between the USB 3.0 port and the board quite often fixes that issue.
However dont use a USB 3.0 cable to the Arduino itself either as they too have been seen to cause some lesser issues.
Only the one on the right is the VM. The one on the left is an actual Win 10 install. I wanted to test two different OS on one system. And since my laptop only has 3.0, I plugged it in there. The Win 7 VM found it just fine, while the main OS still doesn't see it.
I don't actually want to use VM at on my PC, I want to find a way to have it working on my normal Win 10 install. The project I need the board on requires a constant PC connection, so I can't really program the board elsewhere.
Then I suspect the VM is using an ABSTRACT layer to take the USB down to USB 2.0 level as a possible intermediate step between your USB 3.0 and the abstraction layer.
Is that what you are seeing in the VM device manager for USB discovery ?
Still say a USB 2.0 powered USB hub would be the quickest method to be sure about the USB 3.0 ports.
Also there should be at least something in the win 10 device manager even if its a failed device of some type.
When my USB 3.0 ports fail for the Arduinos I at least see a device that has failed in the hardware list on win 8 upwards.
I'll tell you what, since I have no way of properly testing the USB cable that I have either, I'll just order both a cable and a USB 2.0 port just to be sure.
Though they won't get here until tomorrow afternoon, so no way to know until then.
