Intro

Owning one of the newer MacBooks that were designed for bad typing experience, noisy fans and port(un)availability I was facing unusual challenges. Also due to the fact I fried one of my ports once before I became rather cautious about this device and using off-brand-adapters.

Having that challenge combined with the assumption, we would work on that project in a group setting and would need to collaborate, I followed a different approach from the beginning.

"The future is wireless"

Knowing there are indeed wireless-capable Arduino's and other microchips out there which would work straight out of the box with the IDE, it was even more tempting to achieve the same with a tethered Arduino. Of course calling solutions like this (or even wireless charging) "wireless" is doubtful as we are just creating another intermediary and moving the cable away from the laptop - but hey, it is not in my way anymore and I can start the hardware prototyping in a dedicated place without restraint.

What I wanted to achieve

• Everyone in the group work needs access and can participate to the code, without getting out of sync, without much plugging around across different computers or being dependant on internet connection in a physical place (e.g. when using GitHub).
• It had to be wireless - I am using VS Code for pretty much everything and didn't want the dependancy on Arduino IDE and sticking the device straight to my computer, generate too much clutter on my table and eventually might damage something

Setting up VS Code server

• Make sure, SSH is enabled (Raspbian not default, ARMbian by default)
• SSH into your Pi by using Visual Studio Code
• VS Code server will be installed on your current user
• Compiling is done on the Pi, so no Arduino IDE needed on your computer
• There are useful Arduino and Arduino-snippet addons for VS code though

Telling the Pi to compile

Quick start - Ino 0.3 documentation

Warning! Inotool is deprecated and no longer maintained. But you can still install it - I personally still use it for the "serial" command I gotta explain later in this post.

sudo ino build && sudo ino upload && sudo ino serial