Xuino

Xuino ("zwee-no") is a command-line Arduino toolkit that aims to be simple & C-like.

It facilitates the use of simple makefiles by handling the compilation of the Arduino standard libraries. It also exposes a Python API for use with other tools.

It was inspired by Ino and runs on Linux & OS X.

Installation

Before you dive into compiling Arduino code, make sure you've installed all of the following dependencies.

• Python 3.3 or later
• GNU Make
• The Arduino Platform, version 1.0.x
• The AVR GNU C compiler: avr-gcc on Arch Linux, gcc-avr on Debian/Ubuntu
• The AVR Binary Utilities: avr-binutils on Arch Linux, binutils-avr on Debian/Ubuntu
• The AVR C library: avr-libc
• AVR Dude for uploading: avrdude
• Picocom for serial communication: picocom

The package names may vary depending on your distribution. You might be able to install them all at once by installing an Arduino package.

With that done, you can install Xuino from PyPI:

$ sudo pip install xuino

Getting Started

To get a feel for how Xuino works, let's compile a simple web server.

Setting Up

First up, grab an Arduino and plug it in via USB. Then, open up a terminal in the WebServer example directory.

$ cd examples/WebServer

At the moment, this folder just contains standard Arduino code. Let's add a Xuino Makefile so we can compile it.

$ xuino init

The init command creates a new makefile from the template at makefiles/Project.mk. It will ask you a few questions about the project you're setting up, and prefill some variables accordingly.

Answer the prompts as follows:

Project name: WebServer
Board short name: <your board name>
Libraries: Ethernet

Now your WebServer directory should contain two files; WebServer.ino and Makefile. Open up the Makefile to have a look around. Notice in particular how the main executable, $(PROJECT).hex depends on a list of object files. If you're working on a project with lots of source files you can control exactly which ones to compile. Also notice how lots of the variables are filled by calls to xuino. You could make your project right now simply by running make!

Compiling

Although it's possible to make your project with just plain make, Xuino also provides a make command with better diagnostic output.

$ xuino make

Notice how the SPI library was compiled & linked automatically due to the Ethernet library's dependency on it!

All being well, you should now see a few .elf, .hex and .o files in the current directory. The .hex file is the Arduino executable binary, and the others are intermediate object code which can be deleted if you don't mind a bit of recompilation (add rm *.o *.elf to the hex making rule).

Uploading

To upload your code to the Arduino, run make upload. You should see avrdude do its thing, and some sort of success message. Open up a browser and go to 192.168.1.225 to see the web page being served by your Arduino!

If you have trouble uploading you may need to manually set the serial port. You can try running ls /dev/ttyUSB* to see a list of potentially correct devices which you can try plugging in to the Makefile's USB_DEVICE variable.

That's it!

For more information see the official Xuino documentation, run xuino --help from a terminal or run import xuino; help(xuino) from a Python interpreter.

Quick Commands

# Create a new makefile
xuino init

# Build a project
xuino make

# Upload a project
make upload

# Open the serial monitor
make serial

# Alternatively
picocom /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 9600

# Flush out the compiled library cache
xuino clean

Configuration

Xuino reads global configuration from ~/.xuinorc and project-specific configuration from .xuino.

You can use configuration files to change things like your Arduino directory.

See the example configuration file at examples/config for a full list of options.

Contribute

If you like Xuino, please help out! If you feel like writing documentation, adding features or reporting bugs, I'm more than happy to accept your pull requests. I'm planning to write some documentation on how it all works soon. You're invited to read the source code and give feedback. My hope is that Xuino's source code is easy to understand, and as simply as possible.

Thanks for stopping by!

License

Xuino is Free Software licensed under the GNU GPLv3+

© Copyright Michael Sproul 2014.