Arduino Unbox

Recently, I've bought an Arduino starter kit from taobao.com for RMB148.

It comes with a nice plastic box to hold the tiny parts. The kit consists of an Arduino Uno card, several displays parts, bundles of wire and resistors, different sensors, two bread boards, several motors, which are more than enough for one to perform small scale electronic experiments.
















After plugging the Arduino Uno card to my MacBook Air via a USB cable, the card is detected automatically. My card CP2102 USB to UART Bridge Controller is show up in the System Information, although its name is quite different from what is described in the Arduino Tutorial.

After installing the Arduino IDE from arduino.cc , I tried to run the Blink example (File->Examples->01.Basics->Blink)

According to the Arduino Tutorial, Mac can detect the card on the Serial Port automatically. However, the for some reasons, the Serial Port does not show up. I have to install the driver from Silicon Lab to get it working.

http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/pages/usbtouartbridgevcpdrivers.aspx

Now the device shows up in the Arduino IDE (Tools->Serial Port->/dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART)

After selecting the Serial Port the right Board (Tools->Board->Arduino Uno) I tried to upload the program to the Arduino. However the below error comes up.

avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding

After doing some research, I have to workaround this error by connect TX to RX, RX to TX.

Finally, the upload is done and the arduino board is blinking. =)