Edit: this was completely my mistake. See end.
My official Uno worked fine when powered by 12v on VIN, but my Uno clone acted really funny--it read random noise from an input when a simple wire was attached, but not with no wire. It was solved with a pulldown resistor. The worse problem was that the PWM didn't turn off when I called analogWrite(pin, 0)
. More worrying, it seemed to be outputting by power rather than duty cycle, since my small LED strip seemed to be doing higher duty than my big LED strip (both powered by transistors), though both were being set with analogWrite(pin, 0)
. I measured the 5v pin at 5.9v. The input voltage may have actually been up to 12.5 v, but clean. I disconnected VIN and hooked back up to USB, and everything worked fine.
I assume the solution is to either use a linear regulator wired to VIN, or a battery?
I did get the linear regulator, which didn't help. I finally checked all my voltages, and found there was a 0.8 volt difference between different grounds! It turned out my breadboard was wired to the Arduino pin next to ground, instead of ground itself. I feel very lucky not to have ruined the board, and my only complaint is that the pins aren't labeled clearly as they are on my official Arduino. On the other hand, I wouldn't have been able to debug this as easily on the official Arduino, since the clone has lovely solder holes at each pin which are a great spot to stick a voltmeter probe.
the solution is to either use a linear regulator wired to VIN, or a battery
- or stop using cheap chinese knock offs - I mean, clones :p