Sparkfun’s Digital Sandbox

Wherein I unbox and explore a great companion to http://codebender.cc

This afternoon I received Sparkfun’s Digital Sandbox. One of the main reasons why I’ve been setting up Beaglebone Black’s for development of late is the straight-forward, no-nonsense onboarding experience for using a USB connection. Albeit some months ago now, I previously went through most — if not all — of the examples and demonstrations in the Sparkfun Inventor’s Kit (SIK). Afterwards, I missed my connection from the kit into using peripheral devices with my development boards. As I’m trying to have the opposite experience programming Maker projects that I have had programming for the web (where I’ve rarely finished anything that I’ve started), I have been keen to begin to make some crystallized installations of things that actually do stuff. Hopefully I can be more effective at affecting some things in meatspace than I was with poking and prodding at web data!

There’s a small amount of light assembly involved in getting started with the Digital Sandbox, primarily just turning screws through the board and the the provided plastic leg-risers, with the clear acrylic plate sandwiched between them — likely included to provide rigidity to protect the board. Since a tiny screwdriver isn’t included, a screw with a head that lends itself to hand-tightening would be a welcome improvement, especially if it were being used by a group. Regardless, a single, small Philips-head driver is all that’s needed. I’m not really sure why the board needs to be a raised up in the first place, but I’m sure that will bear out in time.

I was pleased to find out they chose to use mini-USB, which is the same connection that I’ve been using with the BBB, and a number of other devices. I’ve been fighting cabling issues in the UAV projects that I’ve been working on of late, and it really saps my motivation to work on a project when I get hung up by a blocker in the form of an inexpensive part like a cable or memory card.

When I tried loading the Arduino application (iMac), it complained about missing a Java Run-Time Environment. While I used this application recently, I also recall updating it to include recently released coverage for Yun. I believe I migrated to this to better explore OpenWRT by way of a Dragino ms14-p that I’ve recently added to my system.

After opening iTerm to verify that I do in fact have Java, as I’d thought, I decided to check out the codebender browser-based Arduino IDE that’s referenced in the well-produced Digital Sandbox Arduino Companion from the learning section of Sparkfun’s website.

codebender intends to make it possible to develop for Arduino devices on any computer through either a Chrome or Firefox web browser. I’ve enjoyed using the BoneScript and Cloud9 IDE tooling to development on the Beaglebone, and this was a similarly enjoyable experience.

I was able to get going with codebender in minutes, and I’ll confess somewhat candidly that it took me a lot longer the first time that I tried to upload sketches to the Arduino using the Arduino IDE. I seem to recall pain points in regard to identifying which communication port my Arduino was on from within the Arduino IDE, but there could be some hindsight bias involved there, also.

Hello World!

Once you’ve created an account with codebender, you’ll notice your username in the upper-right-hand corner after you’ve logged in. You can use a Github account to log in without having to make an account, if you prefer. If you don’t what Github is, you should probably be using it.

If you look closely at the screen capture of the codebender application page above, you can see that the Arduino device you want to select is the Arduino Pro or Pro Mini (33V, 8 MHx) w/ ATmega328.

You’ll need to select that, as it defaults to an Arduino Uno. Furthermore, you’ll likely have to select the correct communication port below, at least I did. Change it from “bluetooth-incoming” to “usbserial,” since we’re tethered by the mini-USB cord.

You’ll want to click the little keyboard symbol in the lower right of the screen, to bring up the modal dialogue with the shortcuts. They are handy and rather familiar (on a Mac, anyways). There’s support for basic code reformatting like I’ve been using in Go(lang) lately, but I found myself mostly just rattling off a quick ⌘+s,r,u to save, verify, and upload the sketch to the Digital Sandbox to be run. Here’s a 10 second “Hello World!”

If you look at the previous screenshot under the Hello World! header, you’ll see a button that says Open Serial Monitor, which is used on some of the later demonstrations in the companion guides, for communicating with and receiving data from the Arduino as shown below.

It’s worth noting that you have to press the Disconnect button to close the connection to the Arduino, or else you will not be able to send a sketch from another tab to the Arduino to try other code.