Learning about computers
In this post we’re going to configure neovim to work with Arduino Language Server.
Neovim comes with an LSP client included, nvim-lspconfig is a plugin that helps us configure the client so it can talk to LSP servers.
This configuration should be enough to get started with Arduino:
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return {
"neovim/nvim-lspconfig",
config = function()
require('lspconfig').arduino_language_server.setup {}
end
}
Arduino Serial Monitor is a tool that can be used for debugging or interacting with our Arduino board. More specifically, it allows us to read and write data to a serial port.
For our sketch to be able to use the serial monitor, we need to use Serial.begin and specify a baud rate. For example:
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Serial.begin(9600);
The valid baud rates vary depending on the board we are using. 9600 is a safe value that works on most boards.
The first thing we want to do is print to the serial port. For example:
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Serial.println("Hello");
In my previous post, Getting Started With Arduino UNO R4, I showed how we can upload a sketch into an Arduino board. In this article, we are going to do the same, but this time using the Arduino CLI.
I personally, use neovim for coding, which makes it a necessity for me to be able to compile and upload my code from my terminal.
If you prefer the IDE, this article might not be for you, but, understanding the CLI could be useful in the future to automate repetitive tasks or run things in a CI environment.
We can install the Arduino CLI on our system with these command:
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# Create a folder to install the CLI
mkdir ~/bin/arduino-cli
# Move to the folder we created
cd ~/bin/arduino-cli
# Install
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/arduino/arduino-cli/master/install.sh | sh
In this article, I’m going to show how to write a simple program for Arduino UNO R4. I expect most of the steps I follow here can be used for other models of Arduino, but I’m going to be using the LED Matrix that come in the board and will only test on this model.
In order to compile and install our programs into our Arduino, we need to download the Arduino IDE. We can get it from the Arduino Software Page.
The installation instructions might vary depending on your OS. I use Ubuntu, so I downloaded the AppImage file.
In order to run AppImage files we need FUSE:
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sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo apt install libfuse2
Then we can just run the AppImage file:
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chmod +x arduino-ide_2.2.1_Linux_64bit.AppImage
./arduino-ide_2.2.1_Linux_64bit.AppImage
In a previous article I introduced Ngspice as a popular open source circuit simulation tool. After some more time playing with circuits, I stumbled into KiCad, a popular open source tool for designing circuits.
KiCad focuses on design of schematics (diagrams that show components and how they are connected) and PCBs. On top of this, KiCad can integrate with Ngspice to run simulations on the schematics we design, making it an all-in-one tool for circuit design.
We can get the latest version of KiCad from their downloads page. Installing it in Ubuntu, is as easy as running these commands:
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sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kicad/kicad-7.0-releases
sudo apt update
sudo apt install kicad
I started learning electronics a few days ago and I’m seeing resistors in every diagram I find and using them in pretty much all my experiments. So far, I’ve been using them blindly, but in this article I’m going to try to get a better understanding of what they actually do.
A resistor is a component that implements electrical resistance. Electrical resistance is usually explained using a water and pipes analogy.
Let’s start by imagining two containers; One full of water and the other one completely empty:
This will be analogous to the two poles of a battery. One of them contains more electrons (water) than the other. While the two containers are not connected, water doesn’t flow.
Let’s now connect the two containers, but we’ll do it with an obstructed hose, so water can’t go through:
I’ve decided to try to learn electronics, and for this, I will of course need to interact with hardware (cables, resistors, diodes, etc…), but I’m lucky I was born in a time when a great deal of circuit design can be done from a computer using specialized software.
Being very new to this world and a stubborn Linux user, I did a quick search to try to find what’s my best option. I stumbled into this Electronics Circuit Simulator Software comparison page in Wikipedia.
I mainly looked at 3 things:
With these simple requirements, I found two contenders:
Qucs-S has a nice graphical user interface, but depends on a SPICE back-end (e.g. Ngspice) to run. Due to this dependency, I’m going to be required to learn Ngspice anyway, so I decided to start with this one.
I’ve known about neovim for a long time, but I’ve never tried it out. My goal for this article is to try to replicate my current vim configuration:
If Neovim is as good as people say, I should be able to do that, and it should run faster.
Neovim is already packaged for most OS. Sadly, the version included in Ubuntu is too old for most plugins out there. For this reason, we’ll have to build from source.
Install prerequisites:
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sudo apt-get install ninja-build gettext cmake unzip curl
When we create a java binary with bazel, we can run it using a command like this:
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bazel run :main
Sometimes an application requires very specific JVM flags to run correctly (For example: -Xmx:512m). These can be set like this:
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bazel run :main --jvmopt="-Xmx:512m"
If we need to set more than one flag, we use this syntax:
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bazel run :main --jvmopt="-Xmx:512m" --jvmopt="-Xms:256m"
There are times that we want to figure out what command line options where used to start a java process. There are a few ways we can do this. The examples below assume PID is set to the process id we want to inspect:
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ps -f $PID
UID PID PPID C STIME TTY STAT TIME CMD
adrian 316721 313854 0 16:15 pts/6 Sl+ 0:00 /home/adrian/.cache/bazel/_bazel_adrian/28381a26654a75034a8803698f5ef496/execroot/__main__/bazel-out/k8-fastbuild/bin/main.runfiles/local_jdk/bin/java -classpath main.jar -Xdebug example.Main
jps doesn’t allow us to list a single process id, but we can see the command line arguments for all java processes: