Pro Micro Clone and IDE 1.0.5

Development Tools IDE 1.x
1

I am having a couple of problems programming my Pro Micro.

First the easy one. If I upload the Blink demo, The led doesn't blink. If I add a Serial.println and turn on the serial monitor, the link blinks as it should. If I turn off the serial monitor the blinking stops. Is this correct behavior? If not, what is going wrong.

If I try to upload a slightly more complicated sketch, As the upload terminates, the Pro Micro become unrecognized and I have to go through the reset process to be able to down load a simple sketch.

What am I missing? Thanks for any comments.

2

You are missing a good working official Arduino board :smiley:

The Sparkfun Pro Micro had troubles, but I think they improved/fixed that board.
The clone could still have those troubles, and perhaps it is also bad or broken.

Is it a 5V 16MHz version ?
I think there is no led on pin 13. There is a TX and RX led. So if your print messages to the serial port, those will blink. That explains the behaviour you describe.
The upload should not terminate. Can you try another usb port with another usb cable ?

Do you have a programmer ? The bootloader might be old and cheesy, with a programmer you can burn a fresh new bootloader into it.

3

Thanks for the comments. This is a 5V version.. It never ieven cross my midn that there wasn't a LED but that makes perfect sense..

I have tried all of my USB ports and get the same behavior. I can get it to the point where it will accept a small sketch but anything larger it seems to fail.

I haven't programmed a bootloader before but , if I understand correctly you can use another Ardunio (Uno) to program the bootloader. I wlll try looking around for the instructions.. Which bootloader should I use?

4

Perhaps you can use the bootloader of the official Arduino Micro.
Or the bootloader from the Sparkfun page.

You can use an Arduino as ISP (so you have two arduinos connected, one as "Arduino ISP", the other is the target).

The Micro has different pins for the MISO, MOSI and other signals, you have to check that.

5

Just to post what the "temporary" solution to my problem was. Sort of embarassed as it was a stupid error. When I tried on a second Pro Micro, it failed with the same symptoms so it sort of pointed towards something I was was doing.

I had started working on putting the arduino into PWR_DOWN_MODE. I got the call to put the device to sleep in the wrong place and the wakeup wasn't working.

Now I have the sleep function properly bypassed until I have a chance to work on it.