How to install Arduino IDE on Ubuntu 20.04 / 18.04 / Linux Mint 19.X?

Hi, folks. In this post, we will show you how to install Arduino IDE on Ubuntu 20.04/ 18.04 and Linux mint 19.x.

You probably already know what Arduino is but in case you don’t, I’ll explain it briefly.

Arduino is a company that is behind the manufacture of an electronics platform whose main feature is that it aims to facilitate the use of electronics in all kinds of projects. However, the main novelty of this is that it does so from the philosophy of Open Hardware.

This philosophy allows the devices to publish to the public all the diagrams and specifications of it. This is great for learning and small projects. In short, Arduino gives the foundation for creating other electronic boards.

Another aspect of the Arduino boards is that it is possible to use this board along with other materials such as sensors and create such important projects as a mechanical arm. Of course, this requires software and here is another advantage of Arduino: the entire software kit is free and accessible.

Arduino IDE is a program that will help you program Arduino boards quickly and easily. The Arduino programming language is Wiring based and has a very low learning curve. We will install it today.

Install Arduino IDE on Ubuntu 20.04 / 18.04 / Linux Mint 19.X?

A big advantage of the Arduino IDE is that it is cross-platform and this makes it possible to install on Linux without any problems. However, in this case, we will do it in Ubuntu/Linux Mint.

First, go to the download section of Arduino IDE and download the package for Linux 64 bits.

In my case, I will do it from the terminal using the wget command.

:~$ wget https://downloads.arduino.cc/arduino-1.8.12-linux64.tar.xz
--2020-03-17 10:58:03--  https://downloads.arduino.cc/arduino-1.8.12-linux64.tar.xz
Resolving downloads.arduino.cc (downloads.arduino.cc)... 104.20.190.47, 104.20.191.47, 2606:4700:10::6814:be2f, ...
Connecting to downloads.arduino.cc (downloads.arduino.cc)|104.20.190.47|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 128701172 (123M) [application/x-tar]
Saving to: ‘arduino-1.8.12-linux64.tar.xz’
arduino-1.8.12-linux64.tar.xz              100%[=====================================================================================>] 122,74M  1,10MB/s    in 2m 26s  
2020-03-17 11:00:30 (861 KB/s) - ‘arduino-1.8.12-linux64.tar.xz’ saved [128701172/128701172]

At the time of writing this post, the last stable version is 1.8.12 so check and modify the command.

Then, unzip it using the tar command.

:~$ tar -xvf arduino-1.8.12-linux64.tar.xz

Once you have decompressed the file, navigate to the folder that was created and within it, run the installation script:

:~$ cd arduino-1.8.12/
:~$ sudo ./install.sh
Adding desktop shortcut, menu item and file associations for Arduino IDE...
done!

However, before using it, to avoid problems when using Arduino IDE, add your user to the dialout group.

:~$ sudo usermod -a -G dialout [your-user]

And now we can run it from the main menu or the desktop.

So, enjoy it.

Conclusion

Learning should not stop, and especially if we love technology and open source. And in this Arduino is something wonderful. Thanks to its boards and its software kit we can easily make interesting projects that we can learn and why not, produce.

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