There will come a moment in your experimentation when nothing will be working and you will have to figure out how to fix it. Troubleshooting and debugging are ancient arts in which there are a few simple rules, but most of the results are obtained through a lot of work.
Suppose the program of blinking an LED on arduino in the last post is not working!! What should you do?? Let's figure out what to do?
Test the Board:
- Plug your Arduino into a USB plug on your computer.
- If the green light marked PWR turns on, this means that the computer is powering the board. If the LED seems very faint, something is wrong with the power: try a different USB cable and
inspect the computer’s USB port and the Arduino’s USB plug to see whether there is any damage. If all else fails, try a different USB port on your computer or a different computer entirely. - If you have been using an external power supply and are using an old Arduino, make sure that the power supply is plugged in and that the jumper marked SV1 is connecting the two pins that are nearest to the external power supply connector.
- If the Arduino is brand new, the yellow LED marked L will start blinking in a bit of a nervous pattern; this is the test program that was loaded at the factory to test the board.
- If you have gone through all these steps successfully, then you can be confident that your Arduino is working correctly.
When you are having trouble with other sketches and need to confirm that the board is functioning, open the first “blink an LED” example in the Arduino IDE and upload it to the board. The on-board LED should blink in a regular pattern.
