[Nottingham] [Talks] *TODAY* Thurs 21-02-2008: Arduino; And What GPL?!

[Joshua Lock]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 6:00 PM, Martin <martin at ml1.co.uk> wrote:
>  To use the Arduino IDE, you need to at least have installed:
>
>     * sun's java runtime (jre)
>     * avr-gcc (aka "gcc-avr")
>     * avr-libc

Fedora seems to have all of these in its repositories. Unfortunately
the bundled IcedTea JVM (in Fedora 8 x86_64) doesn't seem to want to
run the Arduino IDE. I'll have to get an RPM from Sun later.

Has anyone else got the IDE running under a 64bit version of Linux, I
suspect (hope?) it's just IcedTea[1] causing problems.

[Big snip]

>  The most confusing thing I found was in the name/jargon of "Sketches".
>  All a "Sketch" is is a normal C program where the main loop is instead
>  called "void loop()". The hardware bit twiddling is all done by calling
>  up various C subroutines, no assembly code required. I guess the
>  "Sketch" jargon is to try to entice more artists into this high-tech!

That terminology probably comes from Paul Graham. He oft refers to
hacking as art and akin to sketching, particularly in his well known
essay Hackers and Painters[2].

Cheers,

J

1. http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/Main_Page
2. http://paulgraham.com/hp.html

-- 
Joshua Lock
incandescant at gmail.com