This brief tutorial shows students and new users how to install Arduino IDE on Ubuntu 18.04 | 16.04.
Arduino is a popular, open-source physical computing platform used to develop stand-alone interactive objects that interact and controls small electronic boards using sensors.
If you’re a developer who designs and manufactures single-board microcontrollers and looking for a platform to build and manage your applications, Arduino IDE should be a great place to start… It is built from the ground up for IDE developers to get stuff done!
Arduino runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, including Ubuntu.
Before you can start programming your micro-controllers, you’re going to need an IDE program, and Arduino (IDE) is a good one!
For more about Arduino, check out its homepage.
When you’re ready to install and use Arduino, follow the steps below:
There are multiple ways to get Arduino installed on Ubuntu. You can use its office DEB packages as well as install it via Ubuntu Snaps.
Installing Arduino IDE via DEB Package
Arduino packages are not available via Ubuntu default repositories. If you need to install it, you must download it.DEB package from its download page.
https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software
It can be installed on both 32-bit or 64-bit versions of Ubuntu.
Alternatively, you can use the following wget command to download the Arduino Software (IDE) package directly on the terminal.
At the time of this writing, the current latest version is 1.8.12.
cd /tmp
wget https://downloads.arduino.cc/arduino-1.8.12-linux64.tar.xz
Next, extract the downloaded archive file using the tar command below.
tar -xvf arduino-1.8.12-linux64.tar.xz
Now move into the extracted arduino-1.8.12 directory and run the installation script as root.
cd arduino-1.8.12/ sudo ./install.sh
Once the installation is done, a desktop icon will be created on your desktop. The first time you launch it, it will prompt you to trust it with a message as shown below:
Click the Trust and Launch button to open the app.
That’s how to install Arduino on Ubuntu via its.DEB package.
Install Arduino IDE via Snap
If you rather install Arduino IDE via Snap, then use the commands below.
Snaps are containerized software packages that are simple to create and install… It’s a new way to manage packages on Linux systems and is supported by the top Linux distributions…
It’s probably the easiest way to install and manage packages on Linux systems, including Ubuntu…
Run the commands below to install Snap packages and install Arduino IDE.
sudo apt install snapd sudo snap install arduino
To upload code to an Arduino board over USB, you need to add your user to the bailout group and connect the snap to the raw-usb socket.
Open a terminal window, run the following commands and reboot your computer.
sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER sudo snap connect arduino:raw-usb
Now restart your computer and you’re good to go!
That’s it!
Conclusion:
This post showed you how to install Arduino IDE software on Ubuntu 18.04 | 16.04 systems. If you find any errors above, please use the comment form below to report.
Thanks!
You may also like the post below:
Hi,
I haven’t got much experience with Linux (ubuntu), and I have tried the second option mentioned above on a fresh installed 18.04 LTS, fully updated.
The command: sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER doesn’t do anything.
administrator@Slimbook-19:~$ sudo apt install snapd
[sudo] password for administrator:
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
snapd is already the newest version (2.42.1+18.04).
snapd set to manually installed.
The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required:
libfwup1
Use ‘sudo apt autoremove’ to remove it.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
administrator@Slimbook-19:~$ sudo snap install arduino
arduino 1.8.12 from Merlijn Sebrechts installed
administrator@Slimbook-19:~$ sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER
administrator@Slimbook-19:~$ sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER
administrator@Slimbook-19:~$ sudo snap connect arduino:raw-usb
administrator@Slimbook-19:~$ usermod -a -G dialout $USER
usermod: Permission denied.
usermod: cannot lock /etc/passwd; try again later.
administrator@Slimbook-19:~$ snap connect arduino:raw-usb
administrator@Slimbook-19:~$ sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER
administrator@Slimbook-19:~$
I expect that I have done something wrong, but I have no idea what.
Hope you can help me out.
Hello from Eric. When you open your Linux Terminal you need to add your USERNAME i.e.
sudo usermod -a -G dialout john555 then hit [ENTER]
Don’t add $ or @Dell only your username john555 or whatever your Terminal user name is highlighted in green text. It works, I’ve used it multiple times. Also sometimes you may need to add a single space between -a -G. Hope this works for you.
It’s normal for the `usermod` command to not show any output. After this, reboot your computer and you should be good to go!