This page will walk you through installing drivers and software necessary for serial connection in Windows.
Prerequisites
1. FTDI drivers
FTDI drivers come preinstalled on Linux systems, but for Windows you will need to download them based on the version of Windows that you are running: Windows 8 and below or Windows 10. If you get stuck, you can check out our step by step Installing FTDI drivers guide.
2. PuTTY
For Windows PC you will need PuTTY, although you can use PuTTY with Linux as well. Get it here. Instructions for connecting with PuTTY are listed below.
Connecting with PuTTY (Windows)
To connect with PuTTY, first we must connect the laptop to the board via micro USB cable. After that, we have to make sure the board was recognized. For that we go to Device Manager -> Ports (COM & LPT) and, after we powered on the board, we will see a new COM port which we will need to note (COMnumber). If on Windows 10 you may have to click on the View menu and select Show hidden devices in order to see Ports. In this example, the new COM port is COM3:
The next step is to run PuTTY and select Serial under Connection type. There we will input the COM port from the previous step (in our example COM3) and also set Speed to 115200):
and you should get access to the console:
You can now return to following the Quick User Guide tutorial.