Basic help please!

A

AllenCherry

Active member
I am trying to use a Teensy 4.1 with the Arduino IDE 2.3.1, and have loaded the Teensy boards, and selected Teensy 4.1.
I have also installed the 'teensy.exe' which 'pops up' when I try to compile and load the 'Blink' example sketch.
But I am getting an error message in the output window:

Teensy should be selected from "teensy ports" rather
than "Serial ports" in Arduino's Tools > Port menu
No Teensy boards were found on any USB ports of your computer.
Please press the PROGRAM MODE BUTTON on your Teensy to upload your sketch.

The instructions state that I should select Teensy from the 'teensy ports' rather than 'Serial Ports', but that option isn't shown in the Tools 'Port' menu.

I have tried all of the serial ports shown, but none of them work.

Please, what am I doing wrong?

Thank you for your help,

Allen Cherry

(Using Windows 11 Pro)
 
Thank you for your responses - the cable is definitely data / charging, and yes, I did press the Program Mode Button.
Do I have to load any drivers to make the USB port appear as a serial port on the computer?

Many thanks,

Allen
 
AllenCherry said:
Do I have to load any drivers to make the USB port appear as a serial port on the computer?
Click to expand...

No special drivers are needed for Windows 11. Early versions of Windows (before 10) needed a driver. But even on those old versions, programming with Teensy Loader did NOT need a special driver. It uses HID protocol, which has built in drivers on all versions of Windows (at least back to Windows 2000.... the oldest that works, we never supported Teensy on Windows 95 or 98). On those old versions, like Windows 7, you could still program Teensy, and if you selected MIDI or any non-Serial option in Tools > USB Type menu, everything would work fine without installing any drivers. But on Windows 11, and on all versions of MacOS and Linux, no special drivers are needed. The OS has everything you need.

Can you tell us what's happening with the 2 LEDs? Teensy 4.1 has a red LED near the USB connector and an orange LED near the pushbutton.

If your Teensy is brand new, it should have the LED blink program in its flash memory, which causes the orange LED to blink slowly. But if you or anyone else has programmed it previously, the orange LED is controlled by whatever program is loaded, so no blinking or other behavior on the orange LED is normal if another program is in Teensy's flash memory.

After you press the pushbutton, Teensy runs the bootloader rather than your program. The orange LED should turn off. You should see the red LED turn on while in bootloader mode. Normally it stays on dim while waiting for data and is brighter while actually writing data to the flash memory. If something is going wrong, the red LED may blink in a variety of ways. It might be a slow steady blink, or it might blink in short chirps between 2 to 13 times, depending on the specific problem.

Please tell us what you're seeing with both LEDs before and after you press the pushbutton? Be specific. This info is critical to diagnose what's going wrong.

You can also see more detailed info in Teensy Loader's Help > Verbose Info window. But usually that verbose info is only useful when USB communication is at least partially working. If there's no USB communication, it will just show a lot of info about what's happening on your PC. Still, it might be worth a look.


AllenCherry said:
the cable is definitely data / charging
Click to expand...

Power only cables are by far the most common problem. Over and over we've heard people who where sure their cable was good, but ultimately the problem was a bad cable. Some people have even tried 3 or even 5 leftover cables, which all turned out to be power only. They're incredibly common!

But right now, the best thing you can do it tell us what's happening on the LEDs. If you do have some other problem, the LED blinking should give us better info. Otherwise we're only able to blind guess, and the guess that fits what we know so far would be a bad cable.
 
Paul,

Many thanks for your help and detailed diagnostics.
I have ordered a new cable to be absolutely certain of its correctness and reliablity for data transmission!

It should arrive tomorrow, and I wil report back theen.

Thank you for your help - it is much appreciated.

Best wishes,

Allen
 
What happened with the red LED after press the pushbutton?

Red LED on steady (slight flicker ok) means the USB communication is good. If you see this, it means your cable is probably fine and something else is wrong. Problems with the red LED not blinking are also very rare, but we did see it recently from someone who was using a Chromebook - and indeed the problem turned out to be Google Chrome OS is in fact missing an important Linux driver... so the missing driver thing can indeed be an issue, but just doesn't happen with Windows 10 or 11.

A slow steady red LED blink means bootloader is running but it has not heard any USB communication, not even the initial stuff like setting the address or reading device descriptor info, which all PCs do as the first step to detect the USB device. If you see that on the red LED, it's an absolutely sure sign of no USB communication.
 
Paul (and others),

Although the cable that I was using worked with my Kindle, allowing two-way data transfer wit the computer, it did not work with the Teensy. A new cable (which arrived this evening - thank you Amazon!)) works perfectly.
Not all cables are equal - Teensy requires, and deserves the best!

Thank you for your help - I really apprciate the time that you spend helping novices like me!

Best wishes,

Allen
 
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