I'm very new to Arduino and Unix, so please forgive me if I don't know the right terms for explaining my situation. The Arduino board I'd be using is a slight derivative of the Leonardo board.
Anyway, if I connect an Arduino board via USB and open the terminal (OS X/Unix), then type in echo something > /dev/tty.usbmodem1411, it would send something to the board through that port. That's pretty cool, but what if I want to flash an entire .hex file? I don't think just echoing the contents would work. Are there any kind of parameters that I would need to use, etc? Looking at the AVRDude source, I think I may have to erase everything from the board
Oh, I also cannot use AVRDude. Without going too much into detail, I won't be able to install AVRDude on the computer I'd need this for.
I've already tried searching the endless posts on this forum, as well as ask StackOverflow, and tried Googling this, so any info you can give will be appreciated! Thanks!
You don't have an avrdude for your specific OS or you cannot install it?
Can you compile the sources on that platform?
You can also run avrdude on a different computer and upload sketches via TCP/IP
For programmers that attach to a serial port using some kind of higher level protocol (as opposed to bit-bang style programmers), port can be specified as net:host:port. In this case, instead of trying to open a local device, a TCP network connection to (TCP) port on host is established. The remote endpoint is assumed to be a terminal or console server that connects the network stream to a local serial port where the actual programmer has been attached to. The port is assumed to be properly configured, for example using a transparent 8-bit data connection without parity at 115200 Baud for a STK500.
You need to have a program (python, tcl, java, etc) that listens on the targeted host:port and when avrdude connects to it, opens the arduino tty and forwards the communication between IP and serial.