I recently discovered the joys of Arduino! But setting up the development environment on Debian Testing (Wheezy) took me a while. Here is what I did…
Set up the Arduino IDE
Many packages required for Arduino development were recently removed from Debian’s testing repositories. At the time of writing, they are being held in sid, waiting on a some issues before being migrated.
In the mean-time, you can download pre-built binaries from the arduino.cc download page is pretty simple. I downloaded version 0022 for 64-bit Linux. You just unpack this in to a directory and run the arduino script. You’ll need to have Java installed.
Next, you have to get the Arduino device to be detected. This works ok on Wheezy. Plug it in and look in your kern.log. It should show up as a serial device (my Ardino Uno shows up as /dev/ttyACM0).
So far so good.
Get the AVR C++ compiler working
You need to get the AVR C++ compiler and C-library. Unfortunately, the newer versions of the required packages in sid don’t work (which is why they’ve not been migrated). Fortunately, the ones in squeeze work fine. Download the following packages from squeeze
- gcc-avr (the compiler)
- avr-libc (the C-library)
- binutils-avr (tools to work with AVR binaries)
And install them
This way, when they are finally migrated to wheezy, they should just get upgraded normally.
Test the set-up
Open up the Arduino IDE.
Go to Tools -> Serial Port and select the serial port your Arduino is appearing as.
If you can’t see it, there is a problem with the device being detected. If you opened the IDE before the device was plugged in, try closing it and re-opening it.
Go to File -> Examples -> Basics -> Blink. Then go to Sketch -> Verify / Compile.
If there are compiler errors, you have a problem with the set-up of the AVR C++ compiler or the C-library.
Finally, go to File -> Upload to I/O Board. You should see the board’s serial TX/RX LEDs flicker, and then you should see the LED next to pin 13 blinking on and off. Congratulations.
Thanks for the information. Missing a ‘b’ in the installation command line : dpkg -i avr-libc_.deb binutils-avr_.deb gcc-avr_*.de
Fixed, thanks!
(I can’t do OpenID and hope you’ll visit my local interest group’s web site to see that I’m not a spammer.)
I’ve used your make file with fantastic results for some time. The performance difference compared to using the IDE on Linux is breathtaking, not to mention the minimal mouse movements involved, which is excellent for these fingers that got started with an ASR33. Thanks for sharing this!
With Attiny chips, for instance the 84A, including the “-D” avrdude flag causes verification errors. The erase is only optional for some kinds of chips.
Best Regards, Pete