Installing Flora IDE on Linux

Introduction

If you’d like to program an Adafruit Flora board, you’ll need to download their Arduino IDE. However, only versions for Windows and Mac are directly available from Adafruit. But fear not! It’s not difficult to modify your Linux Arduino IDE to program the Flora.

This tutorial was put together after reading the Adafruit Support Thread on the topic.

If you haven’t already, download the latest version of the Arduino IDE.

Download the zip file of the Mac Adafruit IDE from the Adafruit Learning System and extract to any place that is convenient on your computer.

In the Flora IDE folder you just extracted, go to Adafruit-Arduino.app/Contents/Resources/Java/hardware/arduino and open in a text editor boards.txt.

Screenshot of boards.txt location

In your Arduino IDE folder, go to /hardware/arduino and open in a text editor boards.txt.

Copy the section with the Flora settings from the boards.txt file from the Adafruit IDE into the board.txt file from the Arduino IDE. The section you are copying should look like the section below, but double check that there haven’t been any updates in the Adafruit boards.txt since this tutorial was written. Don’t just copy and paste from here, just to be safe.

flora.name=Adafruit Flora
flora.upload.protocol=avr109
flora.upload.maximum_size=28672
flora.upload.speed=57600
flora.upload.disable_flushing=true
flora.bootloader.low_fuses=0xff
flora.bootloader.high_fuses=0xd8
flora.bootloader.extended_fuses=0xcb
flora.bootloader.path=caterina
flora.bootloader.file=Caterina-Flora.hex
flora.bootloader.unlock_bits=0x3F
flora.bootloader.lock_bits=0x2F
flora.build.mcu=atmega32u4
flora.build.f_cpu=8000000L
flora.build.vid=0x239A
flora.build.pid=0x8004
flora.build.core=arduino
flora.build.variant=flora

Copy the folder hardware/variants/flora from the Adafruit IDE to the Arduino hardware/variants folder.

If you had the Arduino IDE open, close and restart the program. Otherwise just open the program. The Flora should now appear in the list of boards.Screenshot of Arduino IDE after Flora installed

 

You’re now ready to upload your first Flora program.