Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. It’s an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board.
Unfortunately the serial port communication driver (RXTX) which comes with the arduino download is not 64 bit compatible. I will describe here how I successfully compiled & installed the driver to get the Arduino IDE running on a 64 bit openSUSE installation. Most of the instructions should be pretty straight forward to be replicated on an other rpm based distribution. For ubuntu/debain based distributions, you can find the instructions provided by Tero Karvinen useful.
Packages Required for Arduino IDE
The following packages are required to run the Arduino IDE:
- java-1_5_0-sun
- cross-avr-gcc
- cross-avr-binutils
- avr-libc
Linux USB Serial Converter Driver
Besides the above software, you will also need a compatible kernel. This means version 2.6.x or at least 2.4.30. For example, it needs USB serial support with the FTDI driver. After connecting an Arduino board to your computer via an AB USB cable, it should load the ftdi modules automatically. Ensure ftdi_sio and usbserial modules are loaded by executing:
lsmod | grep ftdi
It should return output similar to whats shown below:
ftdi_sio 54280 0 usbserial 52688 1 ftdi_sio usbcore 156456 6 ftdi_sio,usbserial,usbhid,ohci_hcd,ehci_hcd
If not, as root, run:
modprobe ftdi_sio
If there are no errors from the above command, then the module is loaded successfully.
System Requirements
The Arduino IDE is java based and RXTX [2] is a native java library providing serial and parallel communication for the Java Development Toolkit. The RXTX lib uses lock files by default. So Before you use lock files you need to do one of two things:
- Be the root or uucp user on your machine whenever you use rxtx
- Or add the specific user that needs to use rxtx to the group uucp. (preferred)
Add your user account to the uucp group by going to yast2 > Security and Users > User Management. Once you have added yourself to the group, you will need to restart your session to make it affective. Once you are in the new session, verify that your account belongs to the uucp group by executing “groups” on the shell. It should give return you a list of groups your account belongs to.
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