Developing Arduino with Docker

Jul 13, 2015

I’m using Gentoo and using Arduino on Gentoo isn’t very easy: Arduino on Gentoo Linux.

It is easy with Docker though. Let’s see how we can upload our first program to Arduino Uno without installing anything apart from Docker.

Kernel Modules

For Arduino Uno I need to enable

Device Drivers -> USB support -> USB Modem (CDC ACM) support

as module.

Then I compiling and loading it with

make modules && make modules_install && modprobe cdc-acm

in my /usr/src/linux. At last I connect Arduino and see it as /dev/ttyACM0.

Installing ino

For this we just need image from hub.docker.com:

docker pull coopermaa/ino

It’s slightly outdated, but I sent PR to use new base image, because that’s how we do this in opensource world. Anyway it works great. Let’s create script for calling ino through Docker, add next script to your $PATH

#!/bin/sh
docker run --rm --privileged --device=/dev/ttyACM0 -v $(pwd):/app coopermaa/ino $@

and call it ino. Don’t forget

chmod +x ino

Alternatively you can use alias in .bashrc:

alias ino='docker run --privileged \
  --rm \
  --device=/dev/ttyACM0 \
  -v $(pwd):/app \
  coopermaa/ino'

but script worked better with my vim.

Uploading program

Let’s create program from template and upload it to board:

$ mkdir blink && cd blink
$ ino init -t blink
$ ino build && ino upload

Whoa! It’s alive!

Vim integration

I’m using Vim plugin for ino, you can easily install it with any plugin manager for vim. You don’t need anything special, it’ll just work. You can compile and upload your sketch with <Leader>ad.

Known issues

For using ino serial you need to add -t to docker run arguments to your script. It works pretty weird though, you need to kill process /usr/bin/python /usr/local/bin/ino serial by hands every time, but it works and looks not so bad.

Also files created by ino init will belong to root, which isn’t very convenient.

That’s all!

Thank you for reading and special thanks to coopermaa for ino image.

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