Pro Micro Clone

[Temika]

Hi Yesterday my pro micro arrived, my first arduino i ever owned. To try it out i uploaded a blink onboard led sketch, but after that my pc stopped recognizing the pro micro: device manager said usb device not recognized (description request device etc). So I tried to go to bootloader mode, shorting reset and ground pins twice: after some tries, the leds stopped blinking and the pro micro wasn't detected by the pc at all (also tx and rx leds stopped flashing when connected to usb, so no communication). I'm not successful in entering bootloader mode, i don't know what to do. Today when i connected the pro micro to the pc the leds were lit all the time and the pc detected it but didn't recognize it; tried reset, tx and rx leds turned off and since then the arduino isn't detected by the pc like before. What can I do? I don't have another arduino to reprogram it. Thanks!

Thanks for the replies! What an amazing community! Yeah, I tried installing ch340 drivers but nothing to do... As Sterretje says probably this chip isn't on the board (I looked at the board and there is no "ch340" component). I used usb 2.0 usbs since my oldschool netbook doesn't have any 3.0 ones... Probably there is a problem with the board (when it was working connecting it to pc made TX and Rx flash few times; now only the power led lits). I don't know what to do... As I said there's no way to enter bootloader mode and I don't have another Arduino to reprogram it

Ok gotcha... I think I'm gonna return this shitty promicro clone and take an original Leonardo; however the promicro is pretty nice because I can hook up the 3.3v RFID card reader without using a stepdown

It's pretty expensive... If I'm gonna buy another Arduino probably I'll take a Leonardo original since the price is so low; however, I was thinking to ask a relative who has his hands in Arduino to reprogram mine, since I think that the bootloader on my promicro is somehow corrupted.
Thanks again for the quick replies!

The normal cause of a 32u4 based board taking an upload once only is that the sketch uploaded malfunctioned badly enough to hose the USB (writing off the end of an array for example will often do this), so no USB device would show up while the sketch was running, making it impossible to upload new code. But double-tap on reset button (or manually shorting RST to ground twice in rapid succession if there's no button) should fix this.

It's also possible that they set the fuses wrong, leading to the bootloader not being started when a sketch was present - in this case, reburning bootloader with an ISP programmer would sort it out (but nothing else would)

Hi! Thanks for the reply! After I uploaded the code to get the LEDs blink (found it on the internet for the sparkfun promicro) the Arduino was communicating with my pc since device manager said that there was a not recognized usb device hooked up (it also said "request description device" or something like that). No driver made it work, so I tried shorting RST and GND twice: the result was that when I was shorting those pins the sketch stopped, and the pc didn't see anything (i have to specify that the sketch interrupted only when I was shorting: even with double short as long as I interrupted the short, the blinking restarted). Then after some more shorting the LEDs were always turned off, except obv the power one. The pc didn't detect it anymore. So I decided to call it a day and went to sleep. Next day I tried hooking up the pro micro: all the LEDs were lit, no blinking; the device manager said "usb device not recognized: request device descript" or something like that like when the sketch was running fine. Tried resetting: TX and RX turned off. Since then the Arduino is not detected by the pc like before, it seems like it's powered with a only power usb cable.

So after 4 frustrating days, I plugged the pro micro in on a whim as a gesture of last rights before sending it to the incinerator, and the PC beeped, the lights flashed and it got recognised as an arduino micro on com port 18, very much out of the blue. I uploaded a sketch to it and it sat there for 4 minutes, beeped and reset itself to dormant bricked state again. Matches and blowotrch now at the ready.

i just bought an arduino pro micro clone from amazon it turns out it was from a website called diymore.cc
this is my first arduino so i didnt really know how to set it up but i though it was ready to go out of the box because its an ATMEGA32U4 but i dug around for some drivers and found sparkfun drivers i downloaded and installed them and then the arduino came up on the device manager but i noticed now that it was mis-identifing

I have an Arduino Pro Micro clone that seems to be in some sort of reset loop. The RX LED is flickering very fast and very dim. The power LED also seems to flicker at the same frequency but has normal brightness.

The Arduino is not recognized by the PC at all anymore. It was working fine before. It doesn't matter if I try to go into the bootloader, by pressing reset twice, or not. Nothing happens. It feels like it is constantly resetting. The flickering stops if the reset pin stays connected to GND.

Another clone from the same shipment is still working fine. Both running the blink sketch. Just this one started to malfunction all of the sudden - after probing the pin I set in the blink sketch with my multimeter to see if the flashing was a success.

I bricked my Pro-Micro within ten minutes of ripping it out the packet. I didn't realise that (a) it's not so brilliant on USB 3.0 - or in my case, unuseable, and (b) it's not actually an Arduino board - the Pro-Micro is a SparkFun product, and any clones thereof are from SparkFun's schematics.

The latter was only a problem to begin with, while I was scrabbling around on the Arduino website in vain trying to find answers. Once I realised to visit SF's website everything calmed down. Read this section on bricked/unrecognised pro-micros, and then have a look at the rest of the page as further reading.

Try this: unplug the Arduino, hold down the reset button, and then plug it in to power. Hold down the reset button a few seconds after you power it on. If this works, you should get the "blink" sketch, and be able to reprogram it.

Alternatively, if you have an ICSP programmer (I use the FreeTronics USBASP), plug this in (you will need to wire up the appropriate 6 pins), and then use the Arduino IDE to burn the bootloader - select the board, serial port, and programmer,then select "burn bootloader" - all from the "Tools" pull-down menu.

You can make it work but only if you use a ISP programmer and burn the bootloader. The internal serial programmer would not work still some HID functions are retained. To me everything works fine except the Mouse functionality.

This a pain in the acc* but it will work for other options. The other thing I have not tried is setting an old arduino ide and use the old addon for pro micro board to see if there a was a change in those files that caused it to fail.

Alright copy that folder and if you do as I mentioned above now you'll head for the Arduino IDE we just downloaded. When you see the arduino files move into the hardware folder and paste the sparkfun folder inside of it (don't navigate any further than this).

If you do this right after a couple of seconds or minutes you will see a message that the process of burning the bootloader was completed. Depending on your hardware speed, if you store things in a flash drive or system is running on a linux live session you will need to wait a bit so just relax.

I did a lot of researching, and stumbled down with a thread in the Arduino forum. It suggested of burning a bootloader to the Arduino Pro Micro via an ISP (a spare Arduino Uno clone in my case). The following demonstrates how the bootloader is burned to the Arduino Pro Micro (clone) via an Arduino Uno (clone).

I was looking for a cheapest possible option to get arduino and wireless comms for a dimmable light and come across this ebay item when searching for Arduino Nano clone. It has no usb port so how can it be programmed?

I have discovered that there is a new device called "Arduino Pro Micro" which is similar to Pro Mini and Nano but have usb port in-built. The best thing is you can buy Pro Micro for under 4 euros! Excellent for a dimmable LED light...

It's similar to an arduino but with the USB to UART converter chip removed to be cheaper. In order to program it you have to use an external converter and connect it to the Rx/Tx pins.
Please note that these boards don't use a crystal as a clock source but a 16MHz resonator which has higher tolerance (0.5%)

If your board outputs Tx pin to Rx header and Rx pin to Tx header (the signals are already crossed) then you should connect Rx of the USB board to Rx of Arduino, and Tx of the USB board to Tx of Arduino (like shown below)

If your board outputs Tx pin to Tx header and Rx pin to Rx header then you should connect Rx of the USB board to Tx of Arduino, and Tx of the USB board to Tx of Arduino (cross connect like shown below)

As well as using the serial-port (via an off-board USB to serial adapter) to program the Arduino-Nano, you can also program the on-board Atmega168/ATmega328 using ICSP. You need a programmer but you can use another Arduino for this (using the Arduino as ISP sketch), a bus-pirate or other devices.

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