Electrical Engineering Tech just discovering Arduino. First time posting, looking very forward to learning and giving back to the comunity here.
Had a quick question. I began writing a couple of sketches while waiting for my boards to arrive. I was planning on printing values to the serial monitor (as opposed to pins) to check the sketches operation until my boards got here and ran into a com error. Does the serial monitor not work unless a board is connected? Tools -> Serial Ports is greyed out for me, and i get an error basically saying "com1 not found". Will i have to wait till my board arrives before i can check my sketches?
I apologize if this has been asked many times. I did to a search but could only find questions from people who had their boards connected.
It would seem you would have to wait. With no card connected (i.e. no USB slave), there is no input to the PC (i.e. USB host) from the missing card and nothing for the monitor to show.
the Arduino IDE does very little to support debugging. There is no emulation, single stepping, or breakpoints to help you to sort out code problems.
Your approach of using the Serial Monitor is the way to test code, but relies on having an Arduino connected. I find that Windows detecting the USB connection and creating the pseudo Serial port can be very slow and frustrating.
In the little project I've been working on I disconnect the USB to power down and extract an SD card to put it on the PC and view a log file to check that it's logging what I want and when I re-connect I have to disable and re-enable the device in Device Manager before it will show up in the IDE.
Welcome to 'Arduinoland', in the end it is an easy way to get into controllers and there is a lot of examples and stuff available to hook up and 'play' with.
