Seeing the Metro on Linux Mint

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British_Tech_Guru
 
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Seeing the Metro on Linux Mint

Post by British_Tech_Guru »

I have Linux Mint 20.3, an Adafruit Metro and the Arduino IDE from the Linux Mint app-store.

I cannot see the Metro on the system via the file manager. I can see it as a connection on the Arduino IDE as /dev/ttyUSB0. Am I supposed to see it via file manager?

Is it possible to program it with the Arduino IDE and see what happens on my laptop screen? I'm used to doing this with the Pi Pico and Thonny so I'm kind of looking at it as though it should work like Thonny.

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mikeysklar
 
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Re: Seeing the Metro on Linux Mint

Post by mikeysklar »

You will only see the /dev device not visible as a USB mounted drive unless you are running CircuitPython or in bootloader mode which only applies to the Metro M0 / M4 / ESP32 not to the older based processors 328p/32u4.

You can open a serial console from the Arduino IDE and see the lines you have printed out to the serial port to monitor the status.

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Re: Seeing the Metro on Linux Mint

Post by British_Tech_Guru »

I think I'm beginning to see things though whether it's what I'm supposed to, I'm not sure. The Arduino IDE is very different from Thonny. Does the IDE change if I used Python or is there a different IDE than 2.1.0.5+dfseg2-4.1?

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Re: Seeing the Metro on Linux Mint

Post by mikeysklar »

Adafruit recommends using the 'Mu Editor' with CircuitPython. It is quite different than the Arduino IDE.

https://learn.adafruit.com/welcome-to-c ... -mu-editor

The Arduino IDE recently revved up from 1.x to 2.x. It looks like you are running the newer 2.x release, but all the Adafruit guides are based on the 1.8.19 or earlier release. If you are following a guide it might be helpful to downgrade to Arduino IDE 1.8.19.

My preference is for using CircuitPython as it is much easier to code in. Maybe just switching over to Mu makes the most sense if you don't care about writing in C vs Python.

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Re: Seeing the Metro on Linux Mint

Post by British_Tech_Guru »

Well that looks very interesting. I'm not sure now whether to go with Python or C++. I last programmed in C++ about 20 years ago so I have a C++ background. I've been dabbling with Python on the Raspberry Pi.

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