how to fix connectivity problems with arduino board on ubuntu 16.04

Question

I need to use the CP210 driver for the Arduino IDE on my ubuntu 16.04. I initially tried to install the driver but were getting lots of errors but I believe the driver is actually already installed

ls -al /lib/modules/"$(uname -r)"/kernel/drivers/usb/serial/cp210x.ko
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 59126 Oct 15 18:24 /lib/modules/4.15.0-122-generic/kernel/drivers/usb/serial/cp210x.ko

I guess it might be a communication issue but I am not sure how to fix this. When I plug in my board the Arduino IDE shows /dev/ttyUSB0 (Silicon labs) as serial port but my code doesn't work and suggests a problem with the board driver. The arduino documentation says I need ‘dev/tty.usbserial-0001 (Silicon Labs)’ or ‘COM3 (Silicon Labs)’ and need to download a CP210 driver

Any help greatly appreciated !

Answer 1

There's a number of things to try here. Since you don't specify what exact board you are using, the following are some general hints, either one of those or none may help:

• Make sure you are using a known-good USB cable and USB port. USB 3.0 ports often don't work well with those boards.

• Verify how to put your board in bootloader mode. Sometimes Arduino IDE doesn't do it automatically.

• Also, depending on how the board is designed, it may switch ports when going into the bootloader.

• Make sure your user is allowed to write to the port by setting up appropriate udev rules and permissions - see here for general hints or here for a particular board, but which may be adaptable to others.

• Try removing modemmanager as explained here, it may interfere with the communication as well.