Ebay china knockoff "Leonardo pro micro" and how to actually use them.

I bought 5 of these (pictures here from the seller I bought them from) off of ebay as I need a cheap micro duino for some wearable projects that are at a reasonable price.   I have bought the "legitimate" versions from sparkfun and other places but their $25.00 price point is simply way over the top.   The China knockoffs so far of the non USB types have been perfect.  But this USB one has some tricks to make it work.

First what I received has "spakerFun" silk screened on the underside, and the USB reports as a sparkfun device.  so in order to use this with the arduino programming software you need to go to sparkfun's github here to get the files you need to not only program and upload to it, but also get windows to actually identify it. (Windows USB drivers,  how lame that windows cant recognize a standard USB-RS232 device like OSX and linux can)  Follow the instructions and copy the files into your arduino install directory as the text file tells you.  I simply copied the contents to the /Program Files/Arduino/hardware/ directory as a folder names SF32u4_boards-master.  re-launch the arduino IDE.

To actually upload to it,   Under tools select board and then the "Sparkfun Pro Micro 5V16Mhz" and under programmer select "USBasp"

If you upload the standard "blink" sketch there is no led on the board to blink for you.  I was bummed by this as the non usb pro micros do.  Under windows this device will show up as 2 usb serial ports. 1 when in bootloader mode and 1 when running the program.  This is only obvious when you do the "double tap"  because it is too fast for you to notice when you do a normal upload.  

If you need more than 2 seconds for the bootloader, double tap reset to ground, you now have 8 seconds for the bootloader.