Hi!
I have followed the Quickstart guide and can compile examples. What doesn’t work is the transfer, Arduino tells me to select a port. I can’t select a port, the entry “port” in the Tool-menu is grayed out.
Please advise, it’s probably a small thing.
Thanks!
Hi there,
If your machine does not actually have any COM ports, which I suspect is the case, there is a solution posted below that will help you out.
Regards,
Mike.
Hi!, thanks, yes, my machine does not have actual COM ports, just USB, exactly.
I can’t find a upload.verify setting in Preferences (screen shot below), I can’t find a settings menu and there doesn’t seem to be a configuration part in the “game” either (currently looking at A-MortalsGame). I can’t find a serial.port setting either and can’t select the port in ports.
Am I looking in the right app? The title bar says “A-MortalsGame | Arduino 1.8.7”, I can see a cyan colored logo with a minus and a plus symbol, each in its circle.
Thanks.
Update… Thanks, MikeSynnott, for your research – I’m one step further now, I have changed the preferences.txt manually and set the port to COM1, that particular error message is gone now.
New message:
"avrdude: Error: Could not find USBtiny device (0x1781/0xc9f)
The USB cable is connected, the small board lights up blue and red, the orange adapter is connected to a blink, the blink pulses red.
Update 2… I give up, after spending a lot of hours getting it to work.
I have googled for the error message, it pointed me to a hint about USB 3 being unsupported. So I tried a “cheap USB hub”, as advised – no change.
So I googled some more… And downloaded the “Pocket AVR Programmer” tool, and set the “Unknown Device #1” to “libusb-win32” and tried my luck again. - https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/pocket-avr-programmer-hookup-guide
Result: One blink doesn’t even run the demo app any longer, it’s just dead. I cannot “start” it with a fork either, it does not light up any more. Also, after a “promising” start, at least something changed, now all I get:
“avrdude: Yikes! Invalid device signature. Double check connections and try again”.
This now happens for every blink I tried and I’m afraid of breaking some more. So instead of being able to access more games than with the “regular” blinks, I now spend a lot of time fixing the “button” and trying to program that thing to get at least one working game – no chance.
I give up. This sucks.
Hi Rene,
You sound so close to the finish line, and as an early adopter, not dev, I am more than impressed by your technical chops. Check your direct messages, we’ll see what we can do to get your Blinks up and running. I have a feeling there are a couple of tips and tricks that might do it and if so, we can make sure they are well documented for the next person.
all my best,
jb
Ok, thank you. Let’s try.
“avrdude: Yikes! Invalid device signature. Double check connections and try again”.
When I get this error, it’s because there is not a solid connection between the Blink and the programming rig.
The trick is to pinch the rig and the Blink together, as shown in the attached photo, to create a solid connection between the two. I do this every time I’m programming a Blink now, out of habit, and I never have a problem.
Unbelievable – it worked!! 
I could even revieve the “broken” blinks with that.
On the programmer, more lights light up and when they go out, the Arduino IDE says “Done uploading” – done.
Will now finally be able to try out the games. Thank you!
Yeah, I found that analysing the problem and working it methodically was really worthwhile.
