So I recently bought this off brand arduino uno from betemcu.cn. it says its r3 compatible.
Can I program this thing with the arduino coder or do I need to use something else? whenever I try uploading the code it says "problem uploading to board"
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Sign up to join this communitySo I recently bought this off brand arduino uno from betemcu.cn. it says its r3 compatible.
Can I program this thing with the arduino coder or do I need to use something else? whenever I try uploading the code it says "problem uploading to board"
The issue is probably that you need a driver for the onboard CH340G USB-to-serial bridge.
The Baite Electronics Arduino clones are generally of good quality and work well.
There are some differences between them and Arduino-brand Arduinos. Two notable ones are a different voltage regulator and (probably the issue here) a different USB-to-serial bridge IC. The Arduino brand products use an FTDI IC and Baite uses, in this case, the CH340 USB bridge IC.
The product is described on this webpage and you will see that they say
UNO MEGA328P CH340G for Arduino Compatible
The CH340G relates to the USB interface IC.
Until about a year ago the USB driver in windows worked with most common USB ICs as well as with FTDI ICs. However, FTDI changed their system so that the Windows driver will now only work with FTDI brand ICs. So it is now necessary to load a driver into the PC (whether Windows, Linux or other O/S) to suit the CH340.
If you email them Baite will provide a link to the CH340 driver, but they do not usually provide it on their website (reason unknown to me.)
Or, you can obtain a driver from numerous websites.
A web search on eg: driver ch340 baite arduino
turns up many pages. How good or how safe any of these is is TBD.
This page claims to provide a Windows 7 CH340G driver and install instructions
This YouTube video describes how to install a driver and provides a link to this page which lists a number of drivers.
Just install your driver. Some might install automatically. Then try to upload the sketch using arduino IDE.