Installing the Software

NEW USB Driver

The new driver can be found on this page (it's all in Chinese). Click the large download button about half way down the page. It will download an exe file. Running that will install the correct drivers. After it finishes installing, plug in the Arduino and launch the Arduino IDE.

Programming Environment Installation

Here are the instructions for installing the Arduino programming software on your computer. I'll first go through the very quick overview then show more details below.

Quick Overview:

    1. Download the correct version of the Arduino IDE for your computer

    2. Install Arduino IDE

    3. Download ArduBlock (ardublock-all.jar)

    4. Install ArduBlock

        1. Open Arduino IDE, Click File >> Preferences

        2. Find the “Sketchbook location:”

        3. Move ardublock-all.jar to “Sketchbook location”/tools/ArduBlockTool/tool/ardublock-all.jar

    5. Close Arduino IDE

Detailed Directions:

Use this link to download the latest version of Arduino IDE for your computer: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software

When you go to that page, you'll see this:

Select the link in the teal box on the right that corresponds to your operating system:

    1. Once it downloads, run the program to install Arduino IDE. It may give you a warning about being dangerous to install programs from the web, but go ahead and continue.

    2. Download ArduBlock by going to this link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ardublock/files/ardublock-all-20130712.jar/download which will save a file called “ardublock-all.jar” to your Downloads folder. Please note, the name of this files changes occasionally and may contain numbers as well. This is not a problem.

    3. While that is downloading, open the Arduino IDE we installed in Step 1. The program icon looks like this:

    1. Once it's open, you'll see a screen like this (note it will look a little different on Windows, Mac and Linux, this is the Linux version):

    1. From here, open the Preferences by clicking File >> Preferences on Windows and Linux or Arduino >> Preferences on Mac.

    2. In the Preferences window, find the “Sketchbook location:”

      1. For Linux, you can see the Sketchbook location is “/home/xxx/sketchbook” where xxx is the username

      2. For Windows, it is usually in “C:\Users\xxx\My Documents\Arduino” where xxx is the username, but be sure to double check.

      3. For Mac, I'm not sure the usual location, so you must check and copy or write down the location listed in the Preferences window

    1. By now, the AdruBlock file should be done downloading. Open your downloads folder and copy the “ardublock-all.jar” file, remember, it might have numbers in it, but it should be the only filename that starts with “ardublock” and ends with “.jar”. Then navigate to the “Sketchbook location” we got in the last step. In this folder, create a new folder called “tools” and open it. In there, create a folder called “ArduBlockTool” and open it. In that folder, create one more folder called “tool” and open it. Finally, in this folder, paste the file we downloaded, “ardublock-all.jar”

    3. In this example, the sketchbook location is: “/home/xxx/sketchbook” and the final folder location where is: “/home/xxx/sketchbook/tools/ArduBlockTool/tool”

    4. Close Arduino IDE and reopen it. Now ArduBlock should be installed and ready for use. To check, click “Tools” and verify that about halfway is “ArduBlock”. Clicking that will open ArduBlock and you're ready to go. It should look like this: