Some great Arduino boards don't come from the Arduino corporation. Seeed Studios has their Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino. An excellent tutorial leads you through 10 sensors and 12 projects. All of the sensors, displays and components are already connected.
Uno DriverWhen you installed Arduino IDE you were asked to install the driver to talk to their boards. Do it once and you can just plug and play, program your board.
Clone boards often use a serial programmer circuit different from the Arduino Uno. Serial interfaces work and it is less expensive when you are making quantity. You need to find the right driver to download and install.
Silicon Labs CP210xPlug the Seeed board into a Windows PC and it won't know what to do with it. Open Device Manager and you will see Other devices or Unknown Device.
If you did not know your board is a Seeed product then a websearch for the names show serial drivers. Do a search for CP2102N USB to UART Bridge Controller and see what you find.
Seeed Studio makes good products and Windows drivers are available. After a restart come back to the device manager and see what serial port has been given. You can hyperterm to this com port and use it for automation.
If you have a different clone board then do the same. Watch device manager and plug in your board. Google what comes up and read what's printed on your board.
Linux BRLTTYPlug in your board and open a terminal. Type $ ls /dev/tty* enter and look for ttyUSB0 this is a board with a serial interface. ttyACM0 is a Uno board from ArduinoCorp.
Type $ sudo dmesg | tail and read what it says. If you see brltty cp210x ttyUSB0 your new board has a conflict with the brail teletype software in your linux computer.
If you feel safe in disabling this feature then type $ sudo apt remove brltty
Arduino IDE should use the board normally. avrdude upload-download program should recognize the clone as an arduino programmer circuit in both linux and windows.
Fast blinking from UART LEDs during flash upload to board.
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