Pre-configured Installation for students

What's the best way to have a room of students install the IDE that is configured with additional drivers, a particular programmer and board in the board manager?

After the student runs the installation, the IDE should be ready to go (with the exception of choosing a serial port.)

Ideally, there would be a folder they download that contains an executable that does the installation. Needs to work on Windows and Mac.

Is this possible?

Hi @Jazzjohn. The solution that will likely come to mind first for the helpers here is to use the "portable" feature of Arduino IDE 1.x:

Although that would be a good solution for Windows users, unfortunately I don't think it is really feasible for macOS users:

https://docs.arduino.cc/software/ide-v1/tutorials/PortableIDE#macos-note

There is a link to a forum thread where some possible workarounds are provided for using a portable Arduino IDE 1.x installation on macOS, but that thread was from years ago and so it is possible it is not applicable to newer macOS versions, which have more strict security restrictions for applications.

Which specific drivers, programmer, and board do you need?

Hi @ptillisch,

The board is from the mega Tiny core collection and is the "ATtiny412/402/212/202". The chip is "ATtiny202". This seems to be about the lowest-cost chip to program in the IDE and is perfect for a student project we have in mind.

The programmer is "jtag2updi" implemented on the Arduino Nano.

I'll look at the portable link.

Thanks.

OK, please let us know if you determine the portable IDE installation option will not meet your requirements. We may be able to find another solution.

The alternative I would consider first:

It is possible to install boards platforms via a command line tool named Arduino CLI. So your installation script could use this tool to do a normal Boards Manager installation of megaTinyCore. This would allow you the option of using Arduino IDE 1.x or Arduino IDE 2.x according to your preference rather than being restricted to Arduino IDE 1.x only as is the case with the portable installation solution (because Arduino IDE 2.x does not have a portable installation capability at this time).

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