Jeff,
I’m using that CP2102 USB>UART I mentioned in another post ( Weird 3v3 problem on my UART).
To be honest, I hadn’t thought about baud rates. I guess the bootloader must have a default rate. If the CPU can’t work out what’s being sent to it, it’s hardly going to respond in any meaningful manner.
Anyway, attached is the schematic I used to actually build the thing. Maybe there’s a bug in there that I can’t see.
Edit: It looks like the Arduino defaults to 115200. I found a CP2102 programmer and have set the UART to the same. See what happens,