im hoping some arduino experts can help with this. myself and couple others here are having trouble with library manager forcing new packages from internet onto drive c: which is almost full. is there a way to get these .json things to install on another drive? for example where the arduino ide itself resides.
can we copy from drive c: and direct the ide there? or an option in preferences for manual install or is this like linux where thats almost impossible due to dependencies and other ancillary stuff?
in particular esp8266 and digispark seem to be taking up the most space on my system disk.
Not without changing the location of your User folder - the packages are installed in the AppData subfolder of your user folder (this is a hidden folder - you need to enable view hidden folders to see it). This is done because on Windows Vista and later, that's the only place that they can install the packages to without having UAC/permissions problems prevent the packages from installing without admin privileges, which is a non-starter for educational use, which is one of the intended markets for Arduino.
Why do you have so little space on your system drive that these are causing a problem? The packages do not take up all that much space. Generally speaking, windows does not like it when you don't have much space on your system harddrive.
Have you disabled hibernation in power options? Disabling that will save a few GB on the system drive, because hibernation requires windows to reserve enough space on your system drive to store the entire contents of RAM (hiberfil.sys - hidden system file in C:)
thanks for the reply. hope you can help me out here. as in title my os is xp with no option to change and also unable to increase c: due to backup which i do every few hours and other reasons. i have nearly unlimited space on d: partition which contains all arduino code, web pages, c/asm source for many platforms, binary, and other data. then theres e: partition also big for programs and utilities including arduino ides (all of them from 0013).
im not sure what is meant by "user" folder hidden or not. as mentioned sketches are kept on a separate partition from ide, again for backup reasons. portability is also a high priority since some of this stuff goes back 30 years with little option to change.
i dont hibernate summer or winter but turn computer off when not in use. swap file is not that big and temp and other garbage deleted periodically with ccleaner so not much room for improvement there.
70% of the space on my c: drive is currently occupied by esp and digistump packages and would be great moved to the same unlimited partition as ide. every time i tried copying files around things ended up beyond repair and needed system restore.
you seem much more experienced in arduino area and any advice to do this would be greatly appreciated.
You can set up the IDE to run in "portable" mode; create a directory called "portable" inside the main Arduino directory (the same directory that contains "Hardware".) This will cause all of the new binaries and libraries and so on to be installed inside the "portable" direction instead of elsewhere. By default it also makes that the location for your sketch directory; I'm not sure whether that's changeable at the moment...
thanks bill, that worked like a charm. a couple others in similar position are also grateful for your hint. btw note that setting sketch folder in preferences still allows programs to be placed anywhere.
another hint, the official wiki puts up this incorrect advice:
Go to the “Tools” menu and then the “Board” submenu - select “Boards Manager” and then from the type drop down select “Contributed”:
Select the “Digistump AVR Boards” package and click the “Install” button.
in reality you must click on "more info" button before "install". a tiny omission but caused a whole lab class to chase their tails, maybe 50 or so man hours, and a couple myself before stumbling on the secret handshake. i suspect 100s or 1000s of hours wasted elsewhere. too bad those who put together these instructions dont actually try following themselves before publishing.
anyway thanks again bill. this isnt the first time you have bailed me out. foolishly thinking wisdom always comes with age some local groups look to me for advice and if not for this forum there would be huge disappointment.
ps. is that "portable" trick described in any wiki or other? i couldnt find anything with google.
Paul__B:
I thought the "Install" button only actually appeared when you selected "more info".
correct. that is really the root cause of much of the difficulties. imo wouldnt hurt to have it appear right away. then the wiki wouldnt be so misleading.
Paul__B:
No, that was "Libraries". How do you get "Digistump AVR Boards" to appear in the boards manager (Contributed) anyway?
ps. i admit to confusing library manager with boards manager too. that was good for a fun half hour. and we are not the only ones. my theory is these schemes are thought up by linux fans and we all know how that works out. lol
john1993:
in reality you must click on "more info" button before "install".
I can click anywhere on the Boards Manager entry to get the Install button to appear. Seems pointless to have to do that though.
john1993:
ps. is that "portable" trick described in any wiki or other? i couldnt find anything with google.
The Arduino developers don't seem to like writing documentation very much. I would never have known about the portable feature if I hadn't seen mention of it in the issue tracker. There was a hilarious message from Massimo Banzi in the developer's mailing list in response to a complaint about the lack of documentation on arduino-builder and he said something like "Maybe we'll use Bountysource to get the community to do that". Why not just make the developer who wrote the code and thus knows it best write the documentation?
Paul__B:
Restart required between those two steps.
