Electronic – arduino – Trasferring Arduino chip from prototype platform to a PCB (Serial Communication)

Whenever I've gotten the 'not in sync' error, it was related to my just missing the reset timing (or forgetting the reset entirely!). For my breadboard, and Eclipse/AVRDude, un-grounding the reset pin just before or at the same time as I click the upload button is the right timing. But also check that your PC really does see the adapter when you plug it in.

Later arduino boards are built to reset whenever a serial connection gets made, and programmatically by the bootloader. This blog article describes how it works, and even more interestingly, how to hack it onto earlier boards. It shouldn't be too hard to put it on a breadboard if you wanted to. The chip needs to have a compatible bootloader, of course (which you've already put into yours). For breadboards, I just do the reset-button / mouse-click dance.

If your device shows up as a CP2013 when you plug the device into a computer's USB port, and you want to replace your Computer with an Arduino, then that isn't really easy to do, or generally possible. The methods you mention in the question have to do where the AVR/Arduino is the device, not the Host.

The device already has a USB-UART converter embedded inside it, and only shows you the USB side of it. This means that your arduino needs to function as a USB host. Functioning as USB host is not straightforward. You need to set up a USB Host/Hub controller, and figure out how to handle enough of the USB protocol stack to talk to the CDC compatible USB-UART device. Using a USB OTG Host controller may be marginally easier, but still nowhere close to being trivially easy. Your best bet would be to see if you can bypass the CP2013 on the device and access the UART lines directly. This may not always be possible. If the CP2013 is actually some other piece of hardware or firmware masquerading as a CP2013, then you're fresh out of luck.