Installing Arduino Libraries On OS X (Appendix 1)

The instructions for installing Arduino libraries given in Appendix 1 need a little work.

When you say “Locate the Arduino icon…”, some readers may think you mean: click on the Applications folder that is on the user’s dock, locate the Arduino icon, and then hold down the control key and click the mouse arrow on the icon. Under OS X 10.7.x (Lion), this will cause the Arduino application to launch.

What you really seem to mean is:

Launch Finder and use that to navigate to the /Applications folder. Be sure that the View is set to Icons. Locate the Arduino.app icon. While holding down the Control key, click the mouse arrow on the icon…”

The above will bring up the context menu you indicate in the second bullet point of A1.1.

Another way of doing the same thing as bullet points 1 through 4 instruct is to open a terminal window and cd to

/Applications/Arduino.app/Contents/Resources/Java/libraries

e.g.

`cd /Applications/Arduino.app/Contents/Resources/Java/libraries`

Of course, to update this folder you need to have administrative privileges under OS X. Any sensible user will do all his or her work from a Standard User account with no admin privileges. At least, I do; it saves a lot of heartache.

But wait! In Arduino 1.0, as recently released, is it a good idea to put libraries here? What happens when you have to update Arduino? Your treasured user libraries will probably vanish if they are not packaged with the distribution.

What I have done in my case is establish my libraries in my home directory. No magic needed. Arduino 1.0 seems to look in

~/Documents/Arduino/libraries

where I have installed the Jeelib library that I downloaded from GitHub, e.g.

drwxr-xr-x 3 bobc staff 102 Dec 11 13:16 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 bobc staff 102 Dec 10 21:04 ..
drwxr-xr-x 20 bobc staff 680 Dec 11 03:35 Jeelib

So now I know that My RFM12 and Ports libraries won’t simply vanish when I update to Arduino 1.0001.

And yes, installing libraries here does work. I got my RFM12B and JeeNode boards configured and talking to each other. This required putting the RF12Demo sketch on one of my old Really Bare Bones Boards, and that meant compiling it from the Jeelib library shown above.

Finally, don’t confuse

~/Library/Arduino

with the ‘libraries’ folder. This is where Arduino 1.0 finds preferences.txt, and I don’t know what else it puts there, but installing libraries there doesn’t make it visible to the IDE when you need to extract a sketch and compile it.

Thanks

Bob