Arduino on Solaris

by Ed Plese ed@edplese.com http://www.edplese.com/blog

Last updated May 31, 2009.

About the Driver

For a while OpenSolaris had been without a driver for the FTDI USB chip on the Arduino. I believe there had been some success from others using libusb to interface with the FTDI chip but I never could find much about this method. The FTDI USB driver was integrated into OpenSolaris starting with build 113. At the moment this can only be had through the Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) release but it should be integrated into the IPS repositories for OpenSolaris in the coming weeks. Because of the binary compatibility in Solaris across different versions I was able to load the driver (SUNWuftdi) from SXCE build 113 onto OpenSolaris build 111 and get it to work successfully. While the title of this page specifies Solaris I have only focused on support for OpenSolaris and have not yet tried the FTDI driver on regular Solaris.

On to the Software

There were a number of changes required to get the Arduino software to work on OpenSolaris. This included patches to the IDE, the Java RXTX library, and avrdude. The patches are listed below and are against r598 from the SVN repository.

• arduino-solaris.diff.bz2 - This patches all of the text files in the Arduino software. In addition patches to RXTX and avrdude as well as a readme file are added in build/solaris.
• arduino-solaris.tar.bz2 - I was unable to create a nice binary diff that would apply nicely so this archive contains full copies of all of the files that were changed including the three binary files.
• arduino-0016-r598.tgz - This is the full, compiled archive for use on OpenSolaris. It's not yet the final 0016 but rather is from around the time of the release candidates. Not included are avr-gcc, avr-libc, and binutils which need to be compiled separately and placed somewhere in $PATH.