Portable Arduino

[sgk]

Use Arduino on USB flash stick without affecting anything on your PC.

To use this feature, simply make a folder named "portable" in the application
root folder where there are "hardware", "examples", "lib" and others.
In this mode, file association setting is disabled in the preferences dialog.

The sketch book folder is inside the "portable" folder. This may be confusing
especially for Mac OSX "Arduino.app" folder.

[sgk]

Pre-built binaries can be downloaded from:
http://code.google.com/p/arduino-i18n/downloads/detail?name=arduino-0151-portable2-macosx.zip
http://code.google.com/p/arduino-i18n/downloads/detail?name=arduino-0151-portable2-windows.zip
http://code.google.com/p/arduino-i18n/downloads/detail?name=arduino-0151-portable2-linux.tgz

[mnoriaki]

The feature is useful to make students bring back their projects to home. I would like to see the feature be merged.

[mactkg]

👍

[cmaglie]

sgk,

very nice feature, I'm in favor of merging it.
I see that you added a RelativePath class, can I ask you why you need it?

C

[sgk]

Thank you.

Without the RelativePath class, the sketchbook location setting in preferences.txt will be recorded as an absolute path which includes Windows drive letter and directory structure outside the the installed tree of "portable" Arduino IDE. If the sketchbook location is recorded as an absolute path, the installed "portable" Arduino IDE will not work when the USB flash drive is mounted as different drive letter (Windows) or mounted on different mount point (Linux and Mac OS X).

[ffissore]

hello @sgk, after having merged and run the modified IDE, the sketchbook folder is indeed in the "portable" one just created while the preferences are still stored on my home folder under ".arduino" (I'm using linux)
Where does it store them on your pc?
I think preferences should be stored under "portable" as well and the selection of the folder (in preferences dialog) should be disabled

[sgk]

Hmmm. I confirm that my preferences.txt files is in PC. I may have trashed my correct version. I will check and fix this.

[sgk]

I am not aware of the commit 24bef6b that moved initPlatform() and Preferences.init(null) in Base.java to the beginning of main(). This is my mistake to rebase my commits without checking this. I will fix and add a commit to this pull request soon.

[sgk]

I think the commit above fixes this bug. I have not yet fully checked because I am on a train to go home now.

[ffissore]

thank you: merged into ide-1.5.x

[sgk]

Thank you!

[WestfW]

I'd like to see the restriction on changing the sketchbook location removed, so that (for example) I can have all the executables on a flash drive or other portable location, and the sketchbook on a cloud directory like onedrive/dropbox/etc.
The choice to use a portable app is the user's (possibly restricted by policy), and the user should still be able to reconfigure anything that IS allowed by policies.

[aethaniel]

Hi, great addition!
Do you think it should be proposed/introduced to http://portableapps.com/apps also (even if Windows only)?

[ffissore]

@WestfW good advice. Please open a separate issue
@aethaniel we don't plan to do that on our own. portableapps is free to do it however

[Testato]

actually if you use "portable" folder is it not possible use a sketchbook folder outside the same disk (on Windows, if you have Arduino+portale folder on C:\ you cannot select a sketchbook on D:)

And, if you are agree, i propose to insert the "portable" folder inside the Arduino .zip download by default. So the people that download the .zip automatically have this option. If a people download the .zip version he think that all the software remain inside the unzipped folder