Introduction: Arduino Nano CH340

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About: Hello, My name is Samuel, I am a student. I love micro controllers like arduino, they are my favorite interest. I also do geocaching, a worldwide treasure hunt game. I hope you enjoy my instructables! Samuel

If you are like me and ordered a cheap arduino nano clone from a chinese website like aliexpress or banggood, chances are that they come with the cheaper CH340 USB to Serial chip. This is a cheap chip that manufacturers exploit to make the clone a lot cheaper. This can also be a downside. For me, being a mac user, I had a real hard time finding drivers etc for it. In the end I found some drivers, which were pretty good and I finally could get a blink sketch uploaded. I now want to share my experience for future buyers so you can get it working a lot faster. Enjoy!

Step 1: Drivers

Basically, let me put it this way. Buy from chinese site, get chinese drivers. I got my drivers from here. Once you have downloaded the file. Unzip the install file and start the install process. Once this is done, reboot your computer. ALTHOUGH WAIT. If you have mac and are running yosemite. You will need to follow the instructions in the next step. If you are not a yosemite user, please skip the next step and restart your computer.

Step 2: If You Have Yosemite

For the drivers to work for you, you will have to do this before you reboot your mac:

1. Open terminal

2. Write the following (just copy from here): sudo nvram boot-args="kext-dev-mode=1" Do not ess up here. It may ruin your computer if you write the wrong code.

3. Once you have pressed enter, terminal will prompt you for your user password. Insert this and press enter.

4. Once done, restart your computer.

Step 3: Testing

If everything is done correctly and there were no errors appearing. You should be able to restart your arduino IDE and see the port. For my mac it is usually like above in the picture but sometimes it changes. You will also notice that once in a while (maybe 1 time of 3) you will get errors when uploading but you do not have to care, the code will usually upload either way.

I hope this tutorial helped you and remember that the CH340 chip is a bit complicated and it may also be used in other cheap arduino board clones. Thanks for reading and once again, I hope it helped you.

Samuel