In Chapter 12, we learned the basics of digital logic. However, I think we can all agree that those chips wound up taking up a lot of space on our breadboards. If we wanted to do a lot of complicated tasks, we would wind up needing a lot of chips, we would need more and more breadboards to put them on, and our project would get unwieldy very quickly. Additionally, as the number of chips increased, it would get very expensive to build such projects.
One important difference between “official” Arduino boards and most Arduino-compatible boards is the USB controller chip. Official Arduino boards use a chip from FTDI to do this, because the drivers for it are preinstalled on every operating system. To save on costs, many Arduino-compatible boards use a lower-cost chip to perform this function (often the CH340). Usually, the only disadvantage of this is that, on some operating systems, an additional driver is needed to communicate with these chips.
You might try the following instructions with a device listed there even if you don’t recognize it as your Arduino in case your computer had difficulty detecting the device type.
