cyborgworkshop.org

The Arduino IDE is a neat little bit of software that doesn’t have a ready made launcher for those of use in the unix world.   It’s easy enough to create though.

• Right click on your taskbar and select Add to Panel
• Choose Custom Application Launcher
• Type should be Application
• Name should be Whatever you want, I just use ‘Arduino’
• Command should be

bash -c “cd $HOME/Dropbox/Code/arduino-0012/; ./arduino”

This assumes that the arduino software is in a directory called “Dropbox/Code” in your home directory. If it’s just in your home directory, then the command would look like this

bash -c “cd $HOME/arduino-0012/; ./arduino”

• Now just pick an icon of your choice and hit OK.

Anyone on a Unix system that uses readline (most) should be able to use these handy little dance moves.

• Ctrl a          Moves the cursor to the start of the line
• Ctrl e          Moves the cursor to the end of the line
• Ctrl r           Context search of your history, hit ctrl r and start typing. Hit ctrl r again to scroll
• Tab             Seriously, you don’t know about tab completion?  How do you dress yourself every day?

Lots more of that here, but those are my most frequent.

Installing the Arduino IDE on Ubuntu 8.04 is pretty easy, you just need to make sure that you have 3 packages installed.

• gcc-avr
• avr-libc
• sun java

Technically, you should be able to get away with the gcj java runtime, but if you have a bug with the IDE, you’ll be encouraged to install Sun jre right off the bat. So, with that, install the compiler and libraries first.

sudo apt-get install gcc-avr avr-libc

Next, Sun Java

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre

And lastly, download the arduino IDE, unzip it and run it. I like to store my code in my dropbox accountto keep things safe and synched between machines.

Good old uptime doesn’t exist on windows boxes (you get to pick if I’m being literal or figurative), so in order to get the time since last reboot on a windows machine, fire up the command prompt and run this.

net stats srv

You’ll get a bunch of stuff back, but way at the top will be a line similar to

Statistics since 3/18/2008 3:42 AM

That’s the last time the server was rebooted.

When you need to restart windows from the command line, say from a remote desktop session, you can use the following commands from the windows command line to accomplish that goal.

To restart

shutdown -r -t 01

Or to shutdown

shutdown -s -t 01