Beatriz

On the driver step, one warning that costs people an evening: install the driver from the chip manufacturer, not from whichever download site ranks well.

Counterfeit bridge chips are common on cheap boards, and there has historically been an ugly cat-and-mouse where a driver update deliberately refuses to work with clones. So a board that worked can stop working after an operating system update, which looks exactly like hardware failure.

If you hit that specific case — worked before, dead after an update, device appears with an error code — the answer is usually an older signed version of the driver. Which is annoying, but it is a known situation rather than a mystery.

Also: on macOS, driver installs of this kind usually need explicit approval in the security settings, and if you miss the prompt the install silently does nothing. Check there before reinstalling for the third time.

Second the pinout-image warning. These board families have many revisions, several manufacturers making near-identical clones, and the diagram you found through an image search is very often for a different one.

The authoritative source is the board definition in the support package you have installed — the header that defines the pin constants. Those constants are what your code actually compiles against, so if the constant exists there and the diagram disagrees, the diagram is wrong.

On a board where the constant does not exist at all, that is itself information: it tells you the board package does not think there is a plain built-in LED, which is a strong hint you are on an RGB-only board.