13. Introduction to Microcontrollers

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.