Hi John,

Sorry to hear of this strange issue.

Can you confirm what serial ports are displayed when you view the available list of ports?

When you rebooted did you power off then on again?

Thanks

Hi John,

I think you need to force a power off. I find windows needs it once every few years

The selected vm serial port is passed to avrdude when it runs.

You can see how, what and where if you switch on tools>options>visual micro>compiler>verbose

With verbose on try the upload and lets see what is returned. 

Avrdude doesn't store anything which is why I suggest the power off/on but only if you are unable to open com16 in the serial terminal

That's strange, Visual Micro generates the command line based on the same settings that put a tick by tools>visual micro>serial port.

Please try re-selecting the port. Visual Micro does attempt to remember the port and there have been big changes in this area however you say the .cppproj shows COM3 which is what the project retains for vm.

Does COM3 or COM16 show in device manager?

EDIT>> What are you clicking to perform the upload?

Tim@Visual Micro wrote on Apr 5^th, 2014 at 3:57pm:

Project/Upload last sketch built

Hi John,

I think/hope this is some minor confusion. 

If you have two projects in your solution it is important to set the port for each project. The port you see in the toolbar relates to the port of the currently "active" project. It is not always obvious which project is active because the code editor and the solution tree can have different active selections.

Visual Micro remembers the upload port for each project. However, if you have never specifically set the port for the project then it will always use the last used port. (needs a bit more dev time to standardise this workflow)

Click the name of projectA in the solution explorer and select a port, then click the name of projectB in the solution explorer and select a port.

Now here is where the confusion can really lie, I just replicated it.

In my solution explorer I was editing and had selected ProjectA, which showed upload port of COM3. I clicked compile and upload and Visual Micro attempted to upload ProjectB using COM16.

Indeed Visual Micro was entirely correct to attempt upload of ProjectB to COM16 because ProjectB is set as the "Start-up Project" in my Atmel Studio solution (ProjectB appears in bold).

Everything worked as you say. Two projects, different com ports. Each one changed when I selected the appropriate source file. I seem to remember that I had to select the upload port from the menu for the actual upload, nevertheless it was all working. Then it stopped working.
Now, even with just one project and one board connected, I am stuck with com16.

cheers, JohnF

F5 - same result

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When switching between multiple projects the expected com port is displayed on the ribbon, ie. a different com port for each project.
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As it was, the com port that was problematic was the one the second project was setup to use (not the startup project).
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Too late - I deleted it. If it happens again I will send you a zip.
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Yes
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No. Both are plugged in all the time. I code for both projects simultaneously because it's a communication system - small changes to one require changes to the other.

My comment earlier about Arduino being a pita refers to the inability to use relative paths in include specifications. I understand why this is so, but it doesn't make it any less annoying for experienced programmers. This is my first foray into Arduino which I have done because it offers the opportunity to very quickly produce prototypes and tech demonstrators. I have been making prototypes for customers for many years, and Arduino has revealed itself as a revolution. What used to take weeks now takes just days. I guess the pita is work putting up with.  VM at least provides me with an environment I am used to and feel comfortable with.  

Further to ongoing problems, nothing has changed. It really is a simple task being asked of VM.

One solution with two projects. One project is targeted at a device on one comm port. The other project is targeted at another device on another comm port. A common enough requirement.

I have just spent an entire day coding and now I cannot upload the code to the device. What a waste of time.

VM refuses to cooperate. This has nothing to do with stupid users who can't read instructions or understand what is happening. Every suggestion so far offered has been tried, and none of them solve the problem.

No matter what I do, VM insists on sending the (any) code to the device on the comm port of the first opened project. Of course avrdude complains, but it is clear now that avrdude is being fed with faulty information from VM, a variable called serial.port that appears to be generated by VM. 

If the system cannot handle such a simple and common task, then what is it's reason for existence. Why bother with providing a user interface that allows users to select different comm ports for different projects when these selections are simply ignored?

These are reasonable questions that require answers.

As requested, if the problem recurs (it never went away), I have prepared an archive of the project files. I have just discovered that I cannot attach this archive to my messages on this forum. I am awaiting a suggestion on how to get it to you.

Hope this helps.

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This is correct. At the time there was no reason to suspect that it had anything to do with the use of two comm ports. When the fault showed itself I was only targeting one device and the other device was disconnected. I could not get the upload to go to the correct port. That was the problem, and still is.

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The "whole bunch of reasons" was, to be accurate, just one - it had a single green arrow. So I was wrong - big deal.

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Frustrated at having worked all day only to find that a development system that ought to be transparent to the development process in fact is stopping further progress. Just human like most people.

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35 years of teaching and tutoring engineers and mentoring in the corporate environment gives me a legion of people who will strongly refute this claim...

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Using two copies is a kludge. There is no reason to expect software not to function as designed.
You think I am not polite but you don't know me, or anything about me. I asked reasonable questions about the operation of VM and some unusual behaviour that indicated a fault in the software. It's behaviour certainly was not consistent with the user interface that was provided in that certain setting were being completely ignored. In response I got questions that indicated that you thought that I, the user, was at fault for not using the software properly. There was no indication that you were considering the software to be at fault, which left me wondering whether it would be fixed at all (and whether my investment in your debugger was a mistake).

Understand this. If you wrote the software then you know intimately it's detailed inner workings. I do not, and cannot, so there is only a very limited amount of information I can give you that may be relevant. You, on the other hand know exactly what questions to ask to probe the problem with precision, so I can do no more than await those questions. All of the questions you have so far asked, I have answered.

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Yes I do. I have done it now several times as part of probing this fault. It does not solve the problem, but it does influence which target/comm port the system gets "stuck on". It's always the start-up project. I did state this on an earlier post.

How about we just focus on the problem from now on.

I am sending the archive immediately to the email you quoted.

Thanks, JohnF