Arduino Projects For Dummies

Chapter 17

Ten Troubleshooting Tips

In This Chapter

Figuring out what to do when you are having trouble

Troubleshooting your hardware

Troubleshooting your software

Sometimes things just don’t go according to plan. It happens. And even if you’ve followed the instructions in this book pretty carefully, your project may not be working quite right.

Figuring out what’s wrong with an Arduino project is a bit different. With electronics-only projects, you just have to focus on the hardware. With software-only projects, you just need to go over your code. But with Arduino projects, you could have a problem either in the hardware or the software. Therefore, you may have to check both, to see what’s going wrong.

Fortunately, there are a few simple things to try out when your project is just not working, is broken, or is working, but not quite according to plan. I almost always start out with my hardware and if that doesn’t sort it out, take a look at the code to see if there’s some kind of problem with it. Sometimes you can tell whether to look at the software or hardware first because of the kind of behavior you’re seeing (or not seeing) in your project.

Here’s what to do when you are having ...