Installing on Linux

Note

The recommended method for installing PROS on all platforms is using our VS Code extension. Instructions for this can be found on the Getting Started page. If you wish to use a different editor or install the PROS CLI manually, continue reading this page.

Installing the toolchain

The steps for installing the toolchain can differ greatly per distribution. The first step is to check whether your package manager offers the arm-none-eabi toolchain. If so, make sure that the version available is greater than or equal to 7.2 before installing.

Note

For some distributions such as Arch and Fedora, arm-none-eabi-newlib is not automatically installed by the package manager and will need to be installed manually, in addition to the compiler package.

If you’re not sure whether your distribution’s package manager has the toolchain available, or if you prefer to install things manually, follow the instructions below.

Note

For users of Debian-based distributions, be aware that the toolchain available through Apt is out of date and likely will not work for PROS projects. For Ubuntu users, you may see references online to a PPA by team-gcc-arm-embedded, but that PPA does not seem to be updated any more. Therefore, if you are using a Debian-based distribution or Ubuntu, please follow the instructions below.

  1. Download the latest version of the toolchain from the Arm developer site. We recommend the “Linux x86_64” release. In the rare event that you are running on an aarch64 machine, use the Linux aarch64 release instead. If you can’t use either of those for some reason (e.g. you have a 32-bit system), you may need to download the “Source Invariant” release and build manually, following the instructions in the archive.
  2. Move the file to your home directory and untar it using the command tar -xjvf gcc-arm-none-eabi-X-20XX-qX-update-linux.tar.bz2:. The Xs should be replaced with those present in the name of the file you downloaded.
  3. Add this line to your .bashrc file (if using bash), replacing <your user> with your username: export PATH=$PATH:/home/<your user>/gcc-arm-none-eabi-8-2019-q3-update/bin/. If you are using a shell other than bash, refer to that shell’s documentation for how and where to add entries to your PATH when logging in.
  4. Close and re-open your terminal, or run source ~/.bashrc (if running bash).
  5. Test by running arm-none-eabi-gcc --version. The output should confirm that the version is greater than or equal to 7.2. If it is not, make sure you don’t have conflicting versions installed through a package manager.

Note

After installing the toolchain using the instructions listed above, upgrading to a newer version is as simple as removing the previous install and following the instructions again with the newer version.

Installing the CLI

  1. If you do not already have one installed, install a version of Python greater than or equal to 3.6
  2. Install the latest version of the PROS CLI from the Python Package Index, using python3 -m pip install --user pros-cli. If you wish to install for all users, run the command with sudo and remove the --user flag.
  3. Run pros --version to verify the CLI was installed correctly. If the command doesn’t work, try restarting your machine.

Installing the Editor

Note

The following instructions are for installing Atom and cquery. If you intend to use an editor other than Atom, this section is optional.

  1. Follow the instructions here to build and install cquery.
  2. Install Atom.
  3. Run apm install pros-bootstrapper@0.0.12.
  4. Open Atom and wait for any plugins to finish installing.
  5. Happy coding!

Note

If Atom seems to get stuck during step 4, restart Atom every few minutes.

Installing the Vision Utility

  1. Download the Vision Utility for Windows.
  2. Move the .zip file to your home directory or your directory of preference. Then, create a directory for the Vision Utility with mkdir vision and cd vision.
  3. Unzip the file with unzip ../vex_vision_utility-0.2.4-win.zip
  4. Download the 32-bit nw.js SDK v0.31.4 for Linux in order to be able to run the nw.js app that is the Vision Utility.

Note

Do not download the 64-bit nw.js SDK, or a later version of the SDK. It will not be compatible and will crash on attempt to load the Vision Utility.

  1. Untar the file with tar xvf nwjs-sdk-v0.31.4-linux-ia32.tar.gz
  2. Install these packages to be able to successfully run the 32-bit nw.js runtime on a 64-bit machine: lib32z1 libnss3:i386 libxtst6:i386 libatk1.0-0:i386 libatk-bridge2.0-0 libgtk-3-0:i386. On a 32-bit machine, you can safely skip this step.
  3. Now run sudo nwjs-sdk-v0.31.4-linux-ia32/nw vcs_vision.exe to execute VCS. sudo is needed to interface with the camera, even if you are a part of the dialout group.