Got a little project that involves some fairly trivial hardware interfacing and firmware, perhaps leading to more challenging things later. Arduinos (or whatever the plural is) are involved.
Well... in pursuit of a project that never quite materialized a couple of years back, I actually have in my toybox an Arduino Uno, that having been the cheapest generic-ish model on offer at the moment I decided I needed one.
I vaguely recall rumors of Issues with the Uno.
So: plug it in, run the GUI thingy, load up the blinky example. Works. Load up the analog-to-serial example. Wedgie! Errors on /dev/ttyACM0. GUI becomes horribly sluggish. Serial monitor won't launch. Regular terminal program can't open the port.
The board wasn't totally bricked; if I played with the RESET button long enough while unplugging and replugging the USB cable, I could at least get it into a state where the GUI would run and let me load a program that didn't try to use the serial port.
A bit of Googlage led me to this fix for the problem.
So now I have a properly-working Arduino, and at least some handle on rudimentary programming. Guess I should probably buy a Book, but for immediate purposes I can probably get by with just mashing up a couple of the example programs and tossing in a few lines of original code.
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