Installing Arduino IDE on Windows 8.1

I was able to work with Arduino UNO using Visual Studio 2013 Community edition (here and here). However, when I wanted to install the Arduino IDE to run on Windows 8.1 Professional, the drivers that came with latest nightly builds (Arduino 1.6.4) did not work. In the device manager I could not find the ports and all that I could see was the node for 'Other devices' having an unknown device. I later found that the driver would work for Window 7 but not on Windows 8.1.

The version appropriate for Windows 8 was an earlier version which I found in the release notes.

ArduinoWin8_1drivers_hint.png

The download of the drivers was on a Google site shown here.

ArduinoWin8_1drivers_Google

I downloaded the zip file, arduino-1.0.5-r2-windows. The extracted folder has the same kind of folder structure as the other versions as shown here:

folderStructure.png

From the driver's folder installed the following:   dpinst-amd64.exe 

ArduinoUSBDriveInstaller.png

Now I could see the ports in the device manager as shown:

ArduinoWin8_1drivers_Google_3

The Arduino UNO's IDE can now be started as shown:

ArduinoWin8_1drivers_Google_4

Clicking Yes and choosing the latest opens up the IDE in the more recent version

 ArduinoWin8_1drivers_Google_5

With so many boards and supported OSs, it can consume time to find the right thing.

Reading serial port with PowerShell:
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2015/06/arduinos-analog-serial-readout-with.html