Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Posting on behalf of student

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Upon assembling the kit and following the instructions we see the circuit is working properly as we can see the robot move in circles upon switching on the switch on the circuit board.
However we have a challenge when we connect Arduino via the provided USB cable to Arduino IDE 2.2.1 installed on my Windows 10 laptop.
We followed the video tutorial on 'how to use an Arduino'.
We get an error 'connection not established' (please see screenshot attached) and is unsure if we are selecting the right board or if there is something else we are not doing right. Due to this we are unable to proceed further. Looking for help at the earliest to get this issue resolved.


Project: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... king-robot

Hi - can you send us a better photo of the IDE? We can't make out the text and it will help if we can see what appears in the drop down menu for selecting the board. Otherwise, some standard troubleshooting steps:

1. Try the "blink" example program before you try any more complicated circuits or projects, this will confirm that your circuit is working.
2. Sometimes "unplug it and plug it back in" or trying a different USB port works, just like you might with any other USB device on a Windows computer.
3. To make sure there's nothing wrong with the USB port on your computer, you could try plugging in a different USB device (USB mouse, flash drive, etc).
4. Try rebooting your computer (again, this is no different from general Windows troubleshooting, it is not really Arduino-specific).

If none of that works - it appears that this may be a bug other people have encountered with the newer 2.0 version of the Arduino IDE. There are multiple forum posts about it:

https://forum.arduino.cc/t/ide-2-0-3-co ... ed/1066586

https://forum.arduino.cc/t/no-connectio ... /1048343/2

https://forum.arduino.cc/t/what-does-th ... ed/1130523

If the problems with the 2.0 IDE persist, you could try the web-based editor instead:

https://docs.arduino.cc/arduino-cloud/g ... ud-editor/

or install an older version of the desktop IDE (Scroll down to "Legacy IDE 1.8.x" on this page):

https://www.arduino.cc/en/software

Please let us know if you are able to get it working and what steps you took.