DorkbotPDX people doing strange things with electricity

I just recently attended the Arduino Cult Induction given by Feurig. Had a great old time inhaling solder fumes and received a cheap arduino development system to boot. I quickly learned, however, that developing Arduino boards with a Benito in Linux is a HUGE pain and doesn't work out of the box for a number of reasons:

• The Arduino IDE will not find the Benito programmer at its Kernel-given home at /dev/ttyACM0
• Java and the AVR tool chain must be installed
• Braille TTY must be uninstalled
• In Ubuntu 8.10 the AVR tool chain is broken and needs to be updated
• The latest Arduino IDE does not come pre-built for 64-bit systems

So here are some things you need to do to start developing your Dorkboard in Ubuntu:

First you need to add a new rule to udev so that is correctly names the Benito. Create a new file called 60-benito.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d like so...

sudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/60-benito.rules

and add the following text to it:

# Link the Benito to a standard USB serial device
KERNEL=="ttyACM*", ATTRS{product}=="Benito*", SYMLINK+="ttyUSB%n"

Now save the file, and restart the udev daemon

sudo /etc/init.d/udev restart

and your Benito device will be named properly.

Now we need to remove a conflicting package which Ubunto installs by default:

sudo apt-get remove brltty

You will need to add some Ubuntu packages which the Arduino IDE relies on to function. In your terminal enter the following command:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jdk avr-libc gcc-avr librxtx-java

If you are using Ubuntu 8.10 you are going to need to jump through some extra hoops because the gcc-var compiler has a problem dealing with long ints, and this is a show stopper for us. Luckily for us 9.04 has already been released so we can just grab the upgraded packages from Ubuntu. I initially tried manually downloading and installing these packages, but it broke apt, so just use the following steps, which I got from Arduino's website:

1. $sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
2. add the following line: deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jaunty main restricted universe multiverse
3. $sudo apt-get update
4. Then update gcc-avr and avr-libc from Synapitic Package Manager
5. remove comment the line added to sources.list by adding a leading #
6. $sudo apt-get update

Finally, you will need the Arduino IDE to start developing your Dorkboard. Go to http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software and get the latest Arudino IDE. As of this writing version 0015 is the newest. If you're on a 32 bit machine, GREAT! Otherwise just grab the 32 bit software anyway, we can just update a file to work on 64 bit machines. To do this untar the arudino tarball wherever you want, then open up a terminal, cd to the arduino-0015 directory and enter the following commands:

rm lib/librxtxSerial.so
ln -s /usr/lib/librxtxSerial.so lib/

You should now be able to run the arduino script in the arduino-0015 dir without any problems. PLEASE post replies if these instructions don't work you your Ubuntu system!

Happy hacking!