Arduino Testing

Arduino Testing: On my Mac with OSX Lion, using the Arduino program starting to try and get a simple Serial feed back system with a serial display working. This is the first step in getting the MAX7219-MAX7221 driver . for the motors working

So far the followings steps to De-Tangle this seemingly simple tasks.

1. Update Arduino on Mac
2. Try to get Arduino source at Github (no joy) git clone https://github.com/arduino/Arduino.git stalls
3. Locate some serial examples (found several)
4. built and ran almost works the arduino code is not all up to date, serial.print no longer uses BYTE
Serial.print(254, BYTE); #old
Serial.print(254); #fixed
5. The formatting and command structure is not current for this display driver.
6. found one with a computer to Arduino to lcd using python to update the display. this could be cool because need to drive the motor external first. but the python needs to import serial. this does not work because of Ros path in PYTHONPATH then learned about python pip, sudo pip does not work on my mac at this time.
7. So now I am updating all the ports on my mac, port self update, port upgrade outdated. Taking forever. This means I will need start to learn python, just another language.

But when you get down to it I am constantly fighting to keep using the Mac for all of Ripley’s programming needs. Therefore; I have several VM’s so I can do ROS on ubuntu, Run Stellaris on ubuntu, My Mac has so many personalities, environments, paths and built in tangles that it gets confusing. I have been remaking the wheel and need to just get to work