Monthly Archives: September 2011

Easier Starting of Pronterface

Starting Pronterface from the command line gets old pretty quickly. Ordinarily, I’m a big fan of of the command line, and usually use it several times a week, but using it just to start up a graphical program is not ideal.
To make it easier, I wrote a little micro-script in TextWrangler (my favorite Mac text editor) that looks like this:
# This little script starts pronterface
# 
python /Users/david/Documents/Reprap/Printrun/pronterface.py 
Then saved the text file (creatively called ‘Start Pronterface’) to the Reprap directory. I then open up the file information dialog (command – I) and changed the ‘open with’ section so that the file opens in Terminal, like so:
File Information Dialog
Once that option has been set, a simple double-click will open up the script in Terminal, which will then start the Pronterface program.

Missing Virtual Com Port

As I mentioned in a previous post, when using Pronterface or Arduino, I mentioned that the virtual com port was dropping out, and requiring re-installation.

When I was attempting to do more experiments with the electronics, I had the same problem again. The virtual com port was just not showing up. I tried re-installing the software several times, but the port was still not showing up in Arduino.

It was becoming quite frustrating, so I turned to Google. I started searching for “arduino virtual com port”. Luckily, on the Arduino website, it came up with this line:

Make sure that the board is plugged in: the serial port menu refreshes whenever you open the Tools menu, so if you just unplugged the board, it won’t be in the menu.

So my problem was that I was starting up Pronterface or Arduino without having the RAMPS board plugged in first. So yeah, that was frustrating.