The Atom editor is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac’s. By itself it has good support for programming. The plugin/extension PlatformIO adds specific support for embedded systems. These make a good pairing, are freely available (Open-source), and I’ve successfully build code for the LPC4088 ARM boards (as long as you avoid the Embedded artists library EALib), and Arduino Uno. Using both C and assembly language.
The Linux (Ububtu) Machines in the Department’s Off-Campus labs are the ones we will be using. They do need some installation/updates of software. If they aren’t set up right the instructions are below.
I have a copy of Ubuntu’s Desktop (which is what we have in the labs) that I use to make sure material works on the lab machines. My setup is:
alun@Ubuntu:~$ git --version
git version 2.7.4
alun@Ubuntu:~$ atom --version
Atom : 1.22.1
Electron: 1.6.15
Chrome : 56.0.2924.87
Node : 7.4.0
alun@Ubuntu:~$ clang --version
clang version 3.8.0-2ubuntu4 (tags/RELEASE_380/final)
Target: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
Thread model: posix
InstalledDir: /usr/bin
alun@Ubuntu:~$ apm list | grep platformio
├── platformio-ide@2.0.0-rc.4
├── platformio-ide-debugger@1.2.4
├── platformio-ide-terminal@2.7.0
alun@Ubuntu:~$ hg --version
Mercurial Distributed SCM (version 3.7.3)
(see https://mercurial-scm.org for more information)
Copyright (C) 2005-2016 Matt Mackall and others
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
alun@Ubuntu:~$
as of 12/12/2017
I plan to use Github for disseminating material (code examples) to the students. Getting them used to using version control as a matter of routine. The Github classrooms provide a very convenient way of handling submission of software projects.
There are several alternatives for accessing, cloning, and updating git repositories.
We will be using git as our version control system. Example code, exercises, and assignment will use GitHub as the master store for the repositories.
A GitHub account will be essential for submitting the code for your assignment.
Once you have your Github account, it is well worth signing up for a Student Developer Pack. There are plenty of useful resources, and you get more private repositories for your account.
To install on ubuntu
sudo apt install git
You will need an up-to-date version of Atom. The Linux version does not automatically track the up-to-date version on the website, so you may have to install the latest version manually.
Atom isn’t in the debian archives yet, so you will need to manually download and install Atom.
Download the deb file and install it. To get the link go to the releases page and copy the link address for the .deb file.
wget https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/download/v1.22.1/atom-amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i atom-amd64.deb
To install on Windows, you will need the Atom installer
PlatformIO uses Clang and LLVM for code highlighting and syntax checking.
Clang has quite a few dependencies so the --yes option
just installs the lot
sudo apt install --yes clang
To install on Windows, you will need the LLVM compliler system (for clang) from http://releases.llvm.org/download.html (64bit installer)
Once you have Atom and LLVM/Clang installed you can install PlatformIO.
Start up Atom and from the preferences (Ctrl-comma/⌘-comma) you can install the platformIO packages. The first time atom starts it does go through an installation process of its own, be patient.
Atom has a command line package manager apm you can install the PlatformIO package with
apm install platformio-ide
Note on Unixes you don’t need to use sudo
The MBED libraries use Mercuial as their version control system. If you have mercurial installed, PlatformIO can automatically download libraries from the MBED site.
For Ubuntu
sudo apt install mercurial
The Mercurial website has downloads for other Operating Systems.