Work with Arduino

Using Arduino with Fedora as a workstation.

Arduino platform

Arduino is a very popular hardware platform among hobbyists. Arduino boards are usually based on AVR platform (using ATmega 8-bit microcontrollers), however there are some boards based on 32-bit ARM microcontrollers (Arduino Due) or even boards combining ATmega AVR microcontroller with MIPS processor running Linux distribution based on OpenWRT (Arduino Yún). Arduino boards are easy to use and ideal for hardware beginners. The microcontrollers are pre-programed with a bootloader allowing you to upload the binary firmware using only USB cable and software programmer.

You can not really run Fedora on Arduino boards, however you can easily use Fedora for developing you applications and projects for Arduino. Extensive documentation on how to write your application for Arduino, together with available libraries and language reference can be found on the project page.

There are couple of possibilities how to interact with and program your Arduino board on Fedora. These are covered in the following sections.

Arduino IDE

Arduino project has its own graphical IDE for developing projects based on Arduino boards. It allows you to:

  • develop your code with syntax highlighting
  • browse available libraries and importing new ones
  • compile the code for specific board
  • upload the binary firmware to the board using variety of programmers
  • connect to the board’s serial console and communicate with it

Installing Arduino IDE

Arduino on Fedora is available through Flatpak.

To install the Arduino IDE flatpak, first, add the remote to have Arduino IDE available:

$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

See Flatpak Usage for more details on Flatpak remotes.

Then install the Arduino IDE with flatpak:

$ flatpak install cc.arduino.arduinoide

Now you are all set to start developing you project using Arduino IDE on Fedora. Just start it from your desktop environment applications menu or run the flatpak run cc.arduino.arduinoide command from the command line. For more information on how to use the Arduino IDE, please refer to the documentation.

Fix denied access

When uploading sketch or connecting to arduino boards, following error might show up:

Error opening serial port...

You need to add your user to the dialout group. Follow the steps in this Arduino guide.


Authors: Adam Samalik, Herbert Smith, Jaroslav Prokop, Máirín Duffy, Pavel Valena