Hi vero,
Thanks for the update. Sorry to hear you've had such trying times with your Cube!
vero96 wrote:After many frustrating attempts to get the cube running on a whim I just plugged it in, and in the task bar ( win8pro ) the new device detected icon appeared and started installing the driver????????? This I can not explain however was happy that the cube was finally working. I then ran most of the examples and the cube worked fine and I was pretty

with my self.
Interesting. That's really strange that it seemed to be related to drivers, the errors you were originally reporting were all at the Compile (aka "Verify") stage, before the Arduino IDE even looks for a serial port so the drivers should have been totally unrelated to those problems.
At any rate, glad it was working!
vero96 wrote:On processing my order one of the staff noticed that there was a device driver install needing approval ( the same PC my cube was plugged into ) the staff member canceled the install and I'm not sure if the cube was safely removed as a device.
I think that's fine. None of that should make a different to the cube, the only time unplugging it might be unsafe would be when an upload is in progress (and even then the worst that would happen is it would need re-uploading.)
vero96 wrote:What's the point??? when I got it home and plugged it in the cube that had been working perfectly 45 minutes ago didn't work that is. The blue LED next to the reset switch on the bottom of the cube came on ( and stays on )
The blue light is the power light, so that's OK. If it flashes other colours this indicates serial traffic.
Unfortunately the Cube doesn't have a "breathing" bootloader LED like the LeoSticks do.
vero96 wrote:and I now get a error message from the IDE telling me I haven't selected a com port, and a Windows errors message 15 seconds or so after plugging it in that the USB device is not recognized by windows and has malfunctioned.
Weird!
To use the Cube successfully with Windows and with "Arduino Leonardo" selected as the board type, you need to have installed both the
Freetronics Windows drivers for the bootloader and also the
Arduino Windows drivers. Without both of these then you'll see Windows "unknown device" errors.
This is because the bootloader (which runs after you press Reset, or during the upload process) reports as a Freetronics device to Windows, but when the sketch runs it reports as an Arduino device. When you press reset, the Cube becomes "Freetronics LeoStick Bootloader" for 8 seconds and then runs the sketch, which will be "Arduino Leonardo".
The best way to see what's going on is to open Device Manager (on Windows 8, type Win-X and then click Device Manager.)
(As an aside, if you download and use the
LeoStick board profile and choose "Freetronics LeoStick V2" in the Arduino IDE instead, then the sketch can run using the Freetronics drivers as well so you don't need the Arduino ones. But it can't hurt to install both.)
vero96 wrote:After many, many wasted hours of hoping the reset button, repeated plug in's would save me I turned to google and the Arduino ISP as a programmer. Having a Leostick on hand I tried unsuccessfully to Burn the bootloader from the Leostick to the Cube. I also used a AtMega_Board_Detector ( Found via the Arduino forum ) using an Eleven I was able to "detect" the Cube's ATmel 32u4 and associated fuses and the rest the relevent information that piece of code generated however that chip is not supported by the programmer ( correct me if I'm wrong ) I would have included that info here as I know it may be useful but the IDE does not want to play right now.
That's strange that you could read data but not burn the bootloader using ArduinoISP on the Eleven. The Cube should already have the LeoStick bootloader on it though (you should see it come up in the Device Manager when it's running.)
vero96 wrote:Since the driver error messages I have tried the cube with 1.03 & 1.0.5 on the win 8 pro, in a win7 machine IDE 1.0.2 & 1.0.3 also a Linux (mint/ubuntu) machine 1.0.5 the cube is just not being recognized
Linux should be a bit more flexible with this because it doesn't require the driver .INF files. Provided it's not a virtual machine (if it's a virtual machine then you need to make sure the USB devices automatically attach to the VM, as the Cube will automatically detach/reattach as a "different" device when it switches between bootloader and sketch.)
If it's not working on a "real" Linux computer, can you provide any more details about what goes wrong?
vero96 wrote:which I find odd because the chip reader knew exactly what chip/fuses/ect. the cube was programmed with so I'm at a loss if anyone has any clue feel free to share.
There are some circumstances where the programmer/ICSP interface will work but not the USB bootloader. Once you get time to provide a few more details we should be able to narrow it down.
Thanks for your patience,
- Angus