Hello forum! Fingers crossed that someone here can help me 'cause I'm at my wits end. I think something is wrong with the serial communication between my board and my computer, no matter what I ask it to Serial.print I get total gibberish. @^@#&^$#^%^^@#$^@&(#(@#*%^^^#&@(@) kind of stuff. Here is what I ~have tried already.
-my drivers are installed properly and up to date, according to windows
-my baud rate is set to the right rate for the port (9600)
-basic sketches like the LED blink do work fine when uploaded
-there is a bootloader sketch still on my board (LED flashes when reset)
-grounded my board by sitting it on a rubber pad
-reassigned serial port from COM3 to COM1 to try to reset the ports
-pressed the reset button, many times
-restarted my computer, the arduino board, and the arduino program a billion times
but when ever I try to serial.print ANYTHING, with nothing connected to my actual board at all, I get nonsense. even this code prints junk.
void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600);
}
void loop() {
Serial.println('hello');
}
This is a brand new Arduino Uno, I'm running Windows 8.1, my drivers are apparently the new properly signed 8.1 compatible drivers, I have no idea what could be wrong at this point!
Turns out it WAS my Baud rate all along, but Windows was being extremely finnicky with recognizing I had the proper rate. I plugged my Arduino into a Mac to find out which Baud rate it was running with, and it was 9600 like I thought, (Arduino just seems easier to trouble shoot on Macs, makes me wish I was working on one but noo) so I reset my UNPLUGGED Arduino, changed my USB serial port's Baud rate back to 9600, restarted my PC, made sure it was still 9600, plugged in and uploaded sketch, and ran it in serial monitor at 9600 *!!! Lower right corner, I didn't know this was here for a while either and was probably throwing me off, other newbies take note! Hello World!
It seems like if I uploaded at a Baud rate other than 9600 and then tried to change the port baud rate and run it I would get all that gibberish, so just cycling through all the possible Baud rates like I was doing wouldnt work, and if I changed my Baud rate while my Arduino was plugged in it wouldn't recognize the change either. I don't know much about Baud rates so I don't know if this is a finicky Windows behaviour or if it's a 'duh' thing for everyone who knows anything about ports, but hopefully my tears and pain this help someone else who runs into this problem. I can move on with writing code, thank god!
If you having this problem and have access to another arduino check to see if it gives you the same serial errors, I was about to go buy a new one when I thought to borrow one and realized the problem was definitely with my ports, not my board. (I had been working with alligator clips in some water so I thought maybe I fried it.)