The trouble is I don’t fully understand how to follow these instructions
At the moment he’s running Peppermint 5 but he wants to upgrade to Peppermint 6, I’ve decided to hold off on the upgrade until I see if the arm can be made run in Linux and how well it works in case I need to either dual boot with windows or run Windows in a VM
Dunno anything about the robotic arm but there is a (simple) guide on the Magpi Magazine Issue 3 Page 14 for the Raspberry Pi (Debian) using Python. It should not be too difficult to adopt that to Peppermint (as it is ultimately based on Debian)
Thanks for that, I’m currently trying to set up a Win XP VM at the moment, to see if that’s a viable solution, then I’ll give those instructions and try to see what works best, I’d rather avoid the VM if I can
The link to the pyusb libraries is a broken link (something about url shortener) I’ve never come across that before,
anyway I had a look at the instructions and although it looks fairly straightforward I can see it being time consuming if it doesn’t work straight out of the box, I wouldn’t normally mind that but this is not my laptop and time isn’t on my side, also I expect it would be very basic compared to the Windows interface and as this is for a wee boy I’m leaning toward just running Windows either in a VM or dual boot,
I have a choice of XP or Win 7 if I went for a dual boot I wouldn’t consider XP but I’m thinking XP in a VM would be ok because it’s only to make this device work (which it does) I know XP is no longer supported and a security risk but I’m sure I could disable networking, also XP would have a smaller footprint and probably less resource intensive making it run a little faster
anyway that’s how I’m thinking your advice or opinions would be appreciated
The instructions would not give you a GUI to control the Robotic Arm. For that check out G-Robot Arm - GUI interface for the Cebek Robot Arm which seems to be using the same machine under different brand.
I followed the instructions but when I tried to run the python script I was getting syntax errors so I moved over to the VM option, but I’m having issues with installing the correct extension pack something about conflicts with the guest additions version, I don’t know why they don’t just bundle all that together so it all works with one installation.
Anyway I’ll post a new thread but thanks for your help it really is appreciated