4.1. Connecting power

Before you can program the A-Star 328PB, you need to connect power to it.

See Section 3 for information about what kind of power supply you can use and which pins to connect it to.

After you connect power for the first time, you should see the A-Star’s power LED turn on. If you do not see the A-Star 328PB’s power LED turn on when you connect power, double check your connections, make sure your power supply is turned on and working, and make sure any headers pins you are using are soldered.

You should also see the yellow user LED blinking once every two seconds. The default program that we ship on the A-Star 328PB blinks the LED, but this program will be erased when you program the board for the first time, so if your board has been programmed before then you might not see the LED blinking.

After connecting power, it is good to press the board’s reset button to make sure the serial bootloader is working. When you press the reset button, the A-Star 328PB serial bootloader will blink the user LED very quickly three times, wait for one second, and then exit. If you see this triple blink after pressing the reset button, it means the bootloader is present on the device and it can run. If there is no triple blink after you push the reset button, then there might be a problem with your power supply or the bootloader might have been erased.