Chapter 1 (Installation of Tools)

Installation of arduino-cli-interactive or aci

For now there are 2 ways to install the aci tool.

  1. Download from source
git clone https://github.com/Vaishnav-Sabari-Girish/arduino-cli-interactive.git
cd bash_shell_script
chmod +x main.sh 
./main.sh
  1. Using Homebrew

To download aci using Homebrew , you need to first have homebrew installed. To install homebrew , copy and paste this script in your terminal

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

After Homebrew is installed , copy and paste the following commands in the terminal

brew update 
brew tap vaishnav-sabari-girish/arduino-cli-interactive
brew install aci

Pre-requisites

For the aci tool to work as intended , there are 2 prerequisite tools required.

arduino-cli

Arduino-cli can be installed using 2 ways

  1. Using Homebrew
brew update
brew install arduino-cli
  1. Using their installation script
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/arduino/arduino-cli/master/install.sh | sh

For other installation methods , check out their website here

gum

This tool helps create awesome looking Terminal User Interfaces (TUI's). You can download gum in multiple ways.

  1. Using Homebrew
brew update
brew install gum
  1. Using Package Managers
#Arch Linux (btw)
pacman -S gum

# Nix
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.gum 

# Flox 
flox install gum



timer

This is an interactive alternative to the default sleep command. It provides aesthetic progress bars.

You can install it using

  1. Homebrew
 brew install caarlos0/tap/timer

For other ways to install timer checkout it's Github Repo



You can also install a few alternative text editors if you do not want to use the default nano editor of linux.

Some options are :

  1. Micro
sudo apt-get install micro
  1. Vim
sudo apt-get install vim
  1. NeoVim
sudo apt install nvim
  1. Gedit
sudo apt install gedit
  1. Visual Studio Code

sudo apt-get install wget gpg
wget -qO- https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | gpg --dearmor > packages.microsoft.gpg
sudo install -D -o root -g root -m 644 packages.microsoft.gpg /etc/apt/keyrings/packages.microsoft.gpg
echo "deb [arch=amd64,arm64,armhf signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/packages.microsoft.gpg] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/code stable main" |sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscode.list > /dev/null
rm -f packages.microsoft.gpg


sudo apt install apt-transport-https
sudo apt update
sudo apt install code # or code-insiders
  1. VSCodium
#Using snap 
snap install codium --classic

#Using Nix 
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.vscodium

#Arch Linux 
yay -S vscodium-bin

#For Debian/Ubuntu distros 

wget -qO - https://gitlab.com/paulcarroty/vscodium-deb-rpm-repo/raw/master/pub.gpg \
    | gpg --dearmor \
    | sudo dd of=/usr/share/keyrings/vscodium-archive-keyring.gpg

echo 'deb [ signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/vscodium-archive-keyring.gpg ] https://download.vscodium.com/debs vscodium main' \
    | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscodium.list

sudo apt update && sudo apt install codium
  1. Helix
#For Debian/Ubuntu distos 
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:maveonair/helix-editor
sudo apt update
sudo apt install helix

#For Fedora/RHEl 
sudo dnf install helix

#Homebrew 
brew install helix 

#AppImage (First download the .AppImage file from the official helix repo)
chmod +x helix-*.AppImage # change permission for executable mode
./helix-*.AppImage # run helix

Post Installation

After the installation of aci there is one small step you have to do.

Type the following in the terminal

arduino-cli board listall
arduino-cli core install arduino:avr

This step will make sure you have the cores of the basic Arduino Boards like Uno , Nano etc.