Arduino Software Windows Vista' title='Arduino Software Windows Vista' />Weve seen just about every kind of clever, DIY trick here at Lifehacker, but weve seen a lot of stinkers too. We recently stumbled upon an insanely popular. Download the latest drivers for your USB devices to keep your Computer uptodate. Arduino USB 5 Steps. When you send a sketch to the Arduino, it will briefly pull a serial pin called DTR low which will reset the Arduino. This can be done manually by pressing the Arduino reset button for a few seconds after sending the sketch. Timing this correctly is a little tricky but can be done successfully with some practice. Now this adapter doesnt use the DTR pin, so it has to be modified to be able to use it. This requires some good soldering skills that you have to decide if you have. I was able to do it and Im old. But it wasnt easy. If you want to skip the Auto Reset and do the Reset manually, skip the rest of this step. Okay you have to solder a wire to one and only one pin on the PL2. The pins are 0. 0. Thats not very much. A wire needs to be attached to pin 2 DTRN. But it can easily be shorted to pin 1 or 3 so be careful. Heres what I did. My soldering iron had a plain copper tip. I sharpened it to a point. I put a cutoff wheel in my drill press to do this. By the way, I did the same thing to my DMM probes. You can also do it with a file. Plug in the soldering iron and tin the tip. The wire I used is 3. AWG wire wrap wire. I know others have used magnetic wire but I dont have any or know where to get it cheaply. I happened to have some wire wrap wire but it can be purchased at Radio Shack or ebay. Slightly irrelevant information The little tool I have is a great way for stripping off insulation of wire wrap wire. Play The Cadet Kelly Game here. You just slip it into the notch in the middle of the tool, pull it down into the V and pull the wire out. Unfortunately, I priced these tools new and theyre about 2. Outrageous. Okay, so using reading glasses, a magnifying glass and a bright lamp and a little solder, I was able to get it soldered. See picture. Note the little circle on the PL2. Hx chip that indicates pin 1 and that the wire is soldered to pin 2. If you have a DMM with sharpened probes, make sure that the wire is electrically connected to pin 2 and not to pin 1 or pin 3. Next, I hot glued the wire to the adapter PCB. It actually covered up D3 the LED for TXD but its clear and the light shines through it. See picture. I hot glued a 0. Fd capacitor 1. 04 to the top of the PL2. HX chip and soldered the other end of the wire to one side of the cap. The other end of the cap goes to the Arduino reset pin but I decided to put it on a header pin so that I can make jumper cables for it. I snipped off a single male header pin and soldered some wire wrap wire to the short side and clipped it short as much as I could. See picture. Then I stuck the single pin into a female header. See picture. Actually, I have some 5. To trim this, what I do is go to the pin past the ones you need in this case the seventh. Take a utility knife or Xacto and scored in the middle of where the pin runs. Do both sides a couple of times. Then carefully bend the header until it breaks apart. You will have an extra metal contact to toss or recycle. On the adapter, there is a five pin strip of male pins labeled TTL. I put the female header on the strip so that the extra pin was just past the pin labeled 3. V. Caution Though the PCB is coated, the clipped off solder connection can be sharp and penetrate the coating. This happened to me on another of these so I had to stick a piece of tape under it to insulate it. Now the insulation on this pin sticks up a little higher than the other five pins because of the wire and solder. But this is okay. The PCB is coated. Then I hot glued the DTR pin to the PCB. Design Doll Crack Temporary here. Then I soldered the other end of the wire wrap wire to the capacitor. See second drawing.