StratoCore_LPC

LASP Optical Particle Counter for Strateole 2

This is the main Teensy application for the LPC main board. It depends on several other source code repositories and Arduino libraries.

In order to play well with Arduino IDE, we have put all of the application code, including the main board program, in the same libraries/ directory where the Arduino IDE keeps its libraries. This will simplify the build environment.

Note: The original GitHub repository was kalnajslab/LPC. The original checkin was 22-Aug-2019. A bit of code development continued after that, but was not submitted to the repo. The repo was updated with those modifications on 01-Jun-2024. The repo was forked to MisterMartin/LPC for the development work prior to the Kiruna campaign. After the Kiruna campaign MisterMartin/LPC was transferred to kalnajslab-org/LPC. It was finally renamed kalnajslab-org/StratoCore_LPC.

Installation

There are 3 steps for configuring the development environment:

1. Install Teensyduino (v1.59.0 or later).
2. Clone the relevant LPC Arduino code repositories.
3. Install Arduino libraries.

Setting up the ArduinoIDE: The Arduino file system organization can be maddening. Here is what works well for our process:

• Create a directory for what the ArduinoIDE calls your Sketchbook location. It's likely that you already have one named ~/Documents/Arduino. Create a libraries/ directory below this.
• Run the ArduinoIDE, and open Settings, and set the Sketchbook location.

1. Teensyduino

See the download and installation instructions for Teensyduino.

2. StratoCore_LPC Arduino code repositories

Cloned from GitHub:

cd ~/Documents/Arduino/libraries                             # Or wherever your Arduino sketchbook  
                                                             # libraries/ is
git clone https://github.com/kalnajslab-org/StratoCore_LPC   # Mainboard application
git clone https://github.com/kalnajslab-org/StratoCore       # StratoCore framework
git clone https://github.com/kalnajslab-org/StrateoleXML     # Strateole message parsing 
                                                             # and comms support
git clone https://github.com/kalnajslab-org/RS41             # RS41 support library

3. Arduino libraries

LPC uses one standard library, and several others which are either not visible to the the Arduino IDE library manager, or are hard to find on the Internet. We have captured zip files of these latter ones, so that we can preserve them, and freeze the versions. These zip files are saved in StratoCore_LPC/zips.

• Using the Arduino IDE library manager, find and install TinyGPSPlus by Mikal Hart

• Install our currated zip libraries, by using the ArduinoIDE to install them. This function is not in the library manager, but rather found in Sketch->Include library->Add .ZIP library....

Note that the zipped libraries won't appear in the Arduino IDE library listing. It might be because they weren't installed from web sites, and so the library manager can't track revision updates?

Building

• Open StratoCore_LPC/StratoCore_LPC.ino in the ArduinoIDE.
• Mash the compile button in the Arduino IDE.

Arduino notes

• Rebuilding: It's a widely complained problem that the ArduinoIDE does not have a way to do a clean build. This is a big hassle when you want to work on cleaning up warnings in our user libraries. There are several convoluted methods proposed for forcing a build. But the simplest one seems to be:
  • Select a different board type and try to build with that. It doesn't matter which one; it will most likely fail.
  • Go back to the Teensy 4.1 type, and do a new build. This will rebuild the sketych and all of the user libraries. It will not rebuild the core, but we really don't care about that.
• Make sure that you have the Sketchbook location set properly in the preferences. It normally is ~/Documents/Arduino, and contains the directory libraries/, which all of our repositories are in. If it is set wrong, you can open a sketch in a repository, but when you try to build it, the Arduino IDE will not find header files. You need to restart arduinoIDE after you change the preference.
• The Arduino IDE serial monitor seems to have a limit to the number of lines it will display. After a few hours of displaying the output from the instrument, it just stops receiving/displaying anything new.
• If you use the MacOS screen command to capture data, don't resize the terminal window. It will clear the display buffer.
• Discovered that if a non-void function does not include a return statement, it will crash the Arduino! It produces a compile warning, when really it should produce a compile error. This thread, and this one also report the same issue.