Arduino on linux with m5Stack



  • There are good how-to docs for Windows and OSX, but not for linux, so...

    Finally got around to starting to play with that m5stack thing I picked up at the last Maker Faire. Since my main system is linux Mint 19.1 I figured this would be straightforward.
    Not exactly. No docs for linux, so I'm on my own.

    So... since linux isn't supported (and the EasyLoader program is Windows-only) I've been carefully cobbling together a system to deal with it.

    The actual url to install in Additional Boards Manager URLs is
    https://dl.espressif.com/dl/package_esp32_index.json

    There's a linux usb-to-serial driver here:
    https://docs.m5stack.com/#/en/quick_start/m5core/m5stack_core_get_started_MicroPython

    After running make the file seems to compile properly.
    Then after reading the CP210x_VCP_Linux_4.x_Release_Notes.txt file I see I need to install the driver separately. Compiling and running the example file also seems to work properly using the port at /dev/ttyUSB0. So far so good.

    The M5Burner on that same web page does work, but I'm still having problems with the Arduino IDE. Compiling code errors out with the messages

    File "/home/mwieder/.arduino15/packages/esp32/tools/esptool_py/2.6.1/esptool.py", line 37, in <module>
    import serial
    ImportError: No module named serial
    Multiple libraries were found for "SD.h"
    Used: /home/mwieder/.arduino15/packages/esp32/hardware/esp32/1.0.2/libraries/SD
    Not used: /home/mwieder/Downloads/arduino-1.8.9/libraries/SD

    OK - turns out that enabling verbose debug messages in Preferences also shows

    Pyserial is not installed for /usr/bin/python. Check the README for installation instructions.Traceback (most recent call last):

    ...and thus my introduction to python wheels. So downloading the latest pyserial wheel and then

    pip install wheel
    pip install pyserial-3.4-py2.py3-none-any.whl

    resulted in a successful compilation and upload in the Arduino IDE.

    Hope this helps someone out.



  • @mwieder Thank you for shareing this.



  • Thank you so much !



  • thanks @mweider and sorry you had to struggle so much. I've had a linux setup tutorial for uiflow I made a while ago which wasn't complete sitting around on my desktop for a while, some things are a little out of date on it but I'll try to get it up at some point for the sake of others.

    I wanted to check with you whether you had to add the device to the dialout group with this command:

    sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER

    I was told it was necessary, didn't work for me. Even though I had installed the drivers
    and run this command, I still had to chmod the /dev/tty directory before I could connect to the device over serial. Perhaps we could set up a seperate forum board specifically for linux users. What do you think?



  • Scratches Head and gets a splinter
    Is the install creating the symlink device?
    Sometimes I had issues with hardware in ubuntu and raspbian and had to manually create the link which then links back to ttyUSB0.