Software

The system includes two software components which communicate via a USB serial link:

  • This control software, which runs on a host computer and provides a user interface via a web browser.
  • The open source Standard Firmata firmware, which runs on the embedded controller inside the device. This is pre-installed on ready-assembled devices.

Installation

The software should work on both Mac and PC - the primary dependencies are a recent version of Python plus a C compiler (needed to install the python-gevent library).

On OS X (or BSD/Linux)

  1. Install XCode from the Mac App Store (you can skip this if you already have a working C compiler on your linux system).
  2. Open the Terminal app (in the /Applications/Utilities folder).
  3. If you don’t already have pip installed, type sudo easy_install pip

And then to install the software: pip install fab-controller

  1. To start using the FAB device, type the command: fab

On Windows

  1. Ensure you have GCC, Python and pip installed.
  2. Repeat the steps above.