Baby Orangutan Arduino v2 support?

Support A-Star and Orangutan
1

Is the Baby Orangutan supported by Arduino IDE 2.x beta 10?

2

Hello.

We expect compiling for the Baby Orangutan to work in the Arduino IDE 2.0 beta (you might need to run the program as an Administrator), but we have not tried programming the board with that version. Have you tried it and are you having problems? If so, can you post the error messages that you are getting or describe how it’s otherwise not working?

- Amanda

3

Thanks for the quick reply Amanda. Everything works fine with the Arduino v1 IDE, but I’m having problems with v2. I have installed the Pololu library in /Arduino/hardware/ as advised and in V2 I can select the Orangutan board and correct serial port OK. However the menu item to select the Programmer is not present, and attempts to upload a file give the error message “Upload error: Error: 2 UNKNOWN: a programmer is required to upload for this board”

When I raised this as an issue on the Arduino V2 IDE github site I received the reply “For now, only Boards Manager installation of Arduino boards platforms is supported by Arduino IDE 2.x. If the developers of the boards platform you are using did not make the effort to provide that installation method, you’ll need to continue to use the classic Arduino IDE until support has been added for manually installed platforms.”

Are you planning to provide a Boards Manager installation method? I know the Baby Orangutan is an old product but it’s still the best small robot controller I’ve found due to the integrated motor control.

4

Hi, cbalmforth.

We will look into making the Orangutan and 3pi platform available in the Boards Manager, but for now, you can work around the issue by manually putting the platform definition in the same place where the Boards Manager would:

  1. Find the Arduino15 folder where the IDE stores data. On Windows, this is usually at C:\Users{username}\AppData\Local\Arduino15; for other OSes, see this FAQ.

  2. Go into the packages folder in Arduino15 and create the nested folders libpololu-arduino\hardware\avr\1.6.0.

  3. Open our add-on zip file (libpololu-arduino-161018.zip) and go into the libpololu-arduino\avr folder. Copy the contents into the 1.6.0 folder that you just created. You should end up with 1 folder and 3 txt files inside the folder Arduino15\packages\libpololu-arduino\hardware\avr\1.6.0.

  4. Now you should be able to run the Arduino IDE 2.0.0, select the Orangutan, and select a programmer. There seems to be an issue preventing the “Pololu USB AVR Programmer” entry from working properly, but if you are using one of our programmers, you can choose “Atmel STK500 development board” instead.

  5. The normal Upload button will still give the error “a programmer is required to upload for this board”. Instead, you will have to select Sketch > Upload Using Programmer or use its keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+U on Windows) instead.

Please let us know if you have any problems following this procedure, and thanks for the feedback about the Baby Orangutan.

Kevin

5

Hi Kevin,
I carefully followed your instructions both in Windows 10 and in Linux Mint (my system of preference), but the problem remains - there is no option to select a programmer. I then deleted the Arduino and Arduino15 directories and recreated them with a fresh copy of Arduino2.0.0-beta10, then repeated both the original Orangutan library installation instructions and your new additional instructions. Still the same result, no menu item to select a programmer.

6

I just tried the steps I wrote again on an Ubuntu VM and found one more step you might need to do: you have to install the “Arduino AVR Boards by Arduino” package from the Boards Manager. Could you check whether you did that and try it if you haven’t? (The Orangutan board definitions depend on some things in the standard Arduino AVR package, and I think the AVR stuff is included by default in Arduino 1.x, but apparently you have to install it yourself in 2.0.0.)

Kevin

7

Fixed it!
I had already installed the “Arduino AVR Boards by Arduino” package and tested that v2 was working OK on an Arduino Nano, but changing to the Baby Orangutan board removed the Programmer entry from the Tools menu. Then I tried renaming the /hardware/libpololu-arduino folder in the Arduino sketchbook folder where it had been placed for v1 support and v2 started working properly. It appears that this folder is required for v1 but must be removed (or renamed) for v2. The other work-rounds you suggested worked as you described.

Many thanks,
Chris

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