Arduino Intro Labs for Tangible Computing - 9. Installation Instructions

Arduino Intro Labs for Tangible Computing

9. Installation Instructions

9.1 Windows XP and 7

If you are the usual user of Windows, where you have administrator rights on your machine, then installing the Arduino software and drivers is relatively simple.

For lab environments, where there are many users, Ardino boards, and workstations some preparation is required to make your life simple. Normally each Arduino generates its own unique COM port. The Arduino USB is identified by the vendor ID (2341), product ID (0001 for the UNO, 0010 for Mega 2560), and the unique serial number. This combination generates a unique COM port number. What this means is that unless you do something special, every new board you plug in to a new workstation is going to require a driver install. This is unworkable for users without admin privileges.

But the device driver can be configured to ignore the device serial number. In that case, you will only get as many devices drivers to install as you have USB ports times board types.

We assume that you have stored the Arduino environment is C:\arduino-22. It does not have to be there.

The process consists of the following steps,

If you have not yet installed the Arduino drivers, this step is not necessary. If you have, you have to first uninstall any existing driver. This consists of the following steps:
1. Make sure all the Arduino boards are unplugged from the USB ports.
2. select Control Panel / System / Advanced / Environment set the System environment variable DevMgr_Show_NonPresent_Devices to 1 If it is not present, add it. Do OK and return back to the system properties window. Select OK to close the control panel.
3. select Control Panel / System / Hardware / Device Manager and then select View / Show hidden devices Then plug in an Arduino board. At this point the device manager should refresh and you will see one or more entries under Ports. You will also get a driver install dialog appearing. Cancel and close that dialog first.
4. uninstall any Arduino drivers in Ports, along with the one called USB Device which corresponds to the board you just plugged in.
5. at this point all previous Arduino drivers should be gone. Leave device manager running so you can see further driver installs.
Add a new registry key to control the Arduino driver.
1. Start regedit by doing Start / Run, and enter regedit into the program box.
2. Add a new binary registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\UsbFlags\IgnoreHWSerNum23410010 with value 01 this applies to Arduio Mega 2560. Use IgnoreHWSerNum23410001 for Uno boards.
3. Carefully check that this is what you added and then close regedit.
Plug in an Arduino board to your "first" USB port. This will initiate a driver install dialog. Select that option that you don't want to connect but have a specific location that you want to look for the driver. Then tell XP that your driver is located in C:\arduino-22\drivers, or wherever they are located. Confirm that you want to install and complete the installation.
Repeat the procedure for your "second" and other USB ports.
At this point each USB port will have a unique COM port number associated with any Mega board plugged into that port. Any Mega board, regardless of serial number should be recognized without having to do a further install.

NOTE: This should work for the FTDI interface, which has vendor ID 0403 and Product ID 6001, for a registry key name of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\UsbFlags\IgnoreHWSerNum04036001

9.2 Things Specific to the XP lab in Computing Science

Installing the UA library onto arduino on the XP machines:

The curreent library code is in shared on 'Senior Ugrad CS Domain' S:

c296/UA-library.zip

unzip this into

C:/arduino/libraries

to add our library to the arduino libraries.

Installing VMWare player onto the XP machines

The current installer is in shared on 'Senior Ugrad CS Domain' S:

c296/VMWare-player-4.0.1-528992.exe

Just double-click to install it, and don't reboot the machine even though it suggest that you do so. A reboot will wipe out the install!

There is a magic incantation that is needed for the virtual machines to run in the CSC 1-67 lab

You will want to edit:
Cmput296_Ubuntu_UofA.vmx
and change:
vmci0.present = "TRUE"
to
vmci0.present = "FALSE"
or else the virtual machine won't run in CSC 1-67. You probably want this on for other operating systems as vmci is the efficient communication interface between the guest and host operating systems.
You might want to remove the lock file:
Cmput296_Ubuntu_UofA_v01.vmwarevm/Cmput296_Ubuntu_UofA.vmx.lck
this saves the students one popup asking if they want to take control of the Virtual machine.

9. Installation Instructions
Arduino Intro Labs for Tangible Computing / Version 1.00 2012-09-24