Any Arduino fans in here?

[Harry Bloomfield]

I ordered a Arduino Nano V3.0 Compatible ATMEGA328P with FTDI FT232RL

5V 328. Whilst waiting for it (Win 10) I installed Arduino IDE V1.8.8 and had a quick look, but didn't change any of its settings.

The Nano arrived this morning, so I plugged it into the USB, it lit up then sat flashing two of the green LED's with a not flashing green power LED. Win10 bing, bong as its plugged in and removed.

Since then I have been struggling to upload a simple program on it using IDE, but each time IDE compiles OK, then complains 'avrdude: stk500_getsync() attempt 10 of 10: not in sync: resp=0x00 An error occurred while uploading the sketch

So far as I could tell, I have installed a driver for it in W10, and it ought to have a port called 'Arduino', but it doesn't. Device Manager shows in ports 'USB Serial Port (COM3) which appears and disappears as the Arduino is plugged in.

Following the procedure described to install the proper driver, it crashes W10 and forces a reboot.

Clicking 'Board Info' produces - BN: Unknown board VID: 0403 PID: 6001 SN: Upload any sketch to obtain it

I have the IDE Tools settings as - Board: 'Arduino Nano' Processor: 'AT328P' Port: 'COM3' Programmer: 'AVRISP mkII' I have no idea what this ought to be set to..

Help please?

[Harry Bloomfield]

Harry Bloomfield pretended :

Solved!

It was the processor selection. There were two versions of the bootloader, old and new for AT328P - it needed the old version.

[Theo]

I think your drivers are confused. Your board has an FTDI USB-serial chip (FT232) - you can get the VCP drivers from here:

Once you have the driver, it should show up as the COM port in Device Manager, and stay there when plugged in. Then you go into the Arduino software and tell it your board is plugged in on COM3 (or whatever number).

I don't know what the 'Arduino' in Device Manager is, I've not seen that before. There are fake FT232 chips and, depending on where your board came from, you might have one of those. They don't work properly.

Theo

[Brian Gaff]

Oh whats one of these then? I see the name no idea what it is. Brian

[The Natural Philosopher]

yeah I f***ed around for about three hours trying to get a hifiberry zero PLUS DAC working on a Raspberry Pi zero...

Before I found a thing on the internet that said 'this doesn't work with the Dac PLUS driver - use the old DAC driver instead'

Sigh.

[Graham.]

An Arduino is a little microcontroller board. You can program it via a USB interface and you program its digital and analouge I/O pins.

Typically you build or buy daughter cards called "shields" that do stuff, like keypads, displays, motor drivers, etc. etc.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Brian Gaff laid this down on his screen :

It is a really tiny 16Mhz processor, memory and some i/o on a PCB around 2" x 1", with a USB interface built in, which enables you to plug it into a PC to program it. which like the RPi has quite a following. £8 delivered, complete with leads.

Plan is to plug it into my heating systems Ebus, then maybe my Rpi feeding data to my PC, or direct to PC, so I can see what my heating system is doing. Just an interesting project, for my own amusement and no great cost if it doesn't work..

[Brian Gaff]

Oh dear, I can see it now, robot curtain closers or maybe you could reinvent the teasmade? Brian

[whisky-dave]

Nah it'd have to be a cappichino or flat skinny latta mocha or something. Teas so 70s. But with an arduino you could get it to stir, blow bubbles, flash LED's, adjust remote lighting, and all sorts of things while making the brew.

[Steve Walker]

I have one operating a turntable for my model railway, using a motor shield to drive a stepper motor and an LCD shield with buttons as an interface - although I may change to an ethernet shield later.

I am planning to use another to drive a digitaly encoded signal to act as a DCC controller for the locos (DCC++) using another motor shield and an ethernet shield.

Finally, I may also drive point motors via relay boards, again along with an ethernet shield.

Initially they will be controlled using a spare PC - probably running JMRI.

In the end the three system will all then be able to be controlled from handheld units either wired for ethernet or using wi-fi to connect to the network.

SteveW

[dr.s.lartius]

Can a window on the PC be used as a console for a program running on the Arduino? Can an "ordinary" program on the PC communicate with an Arduino program?

[invalid]

There are many ways to do so.

The serial console over USB being the easy option.

Then there are serial ports, ether net, wireless including bluetooth and wifi. You can run web browsers as outputs too.

[whisky-dave]

Yes I've used a Mac to do this too, even linux can run it.

depends what you mean by "ordinary"

Can an "ordinary" tyre be used on my car, can an "ordinary" word processor work on my compter.

[Johnny B Good]

You can get them even cheaper than that. I paid a mere £4.45 for one with a USB lead (I pushed the boat out - it would have only been £3.49 sans USB lead).

I ordered it a week last Thursday with a promised delivery of last Monday or Tuesday but it arrived in Saturday morning's post almost a week ago now.

The idea was to utilise it with a U-blox NEO M8N GPS module to make up a programmable frequency output GPSDO on the cheap. I haven't even broken the seal on its antistatic bag so I can't comment on its functionality just yet but, for a mere £3.49 for an out of warranty replacement, I'm not overly bovvered whether it actually works or not (I had other distractions to worry about).

However, I might get round to downloading the IDE for it and plug it into my PC just for a quick test later this week. Das Blinkenlight (the Arduino version of "Hello World") 'sketch' should be enough of a basic functional test for now.

TBH, I'm not sure whether the programmable frequency feature of the NEO M8N is worth bothering with, other than for fixing it at 10MHz to discipline a VCOCXO with the addition of a PLL to generate an additional

30MHz test reference output to assist recalibration of my signal generator's internal TCXO frequency reference and the XO reference in my Kenwood TS140S HF transceiver[1].

If nothing else, the Arduino nano will let me add an alphanumeric display to my GPSDO box so I can monitor the number of locked satellites and indicate a valid locked frequency state or the loss of locked output. Whether I'd bother with a hex keypad or just use a few push buttons is something I've yet to decide. Whatever I go for, the Arduino nano will be central to making a self contained GPSDO unit.

[1] At the moment, I'm simply using the NEO M8N's raw 10MHz output on the PPS pin (and its third harmonic) directly as calibration frequency references with nothing more than a cheap active patch antenna on a 5 metre lead, after using U-Blox's u-centre software installed on a winXP VM to program its PPS line to output the required 10MHz signal.

The built in patch antenna in the module I bought wasn't pulling strong enough signals in to actually lock onto any satellites. The suspect being a microscopic 1.5GHz low noise amplifier chip (the module only cost me 21 quid delivered). Just barely enough signal was being received to pick up the satellite's idents but not their data. Plugging a 14 cm 3/4 wave wire into its SMA socket worked quite well, proving that spending a whole three quid on the external amplified antenna wasn't going to be a wasted investment.

Checking just now with u-centre, I can see I've now got a lock on 19 satellites. It rarely dips below the 16 satellite mark since I placed my external mag mount antenna on a ballasted biscuit tin parked on the flat bay window roof a couple of days ago. Even the 14cm wire antenna with the unit on a window ledge was able to rustle up some 10 to 12 satellites! :-)