Installing

Dependencies

To install Chiplotle you must already have Python 2.5 or Python 2.6 installed in your computer.

Chiplotle has the following dependencies:

NumPy (for number crunching): http://numpy.scipy.org/

PySerial (for serial communication): http://pyserial.sourceforge.net/

hp2xx (for image export / hpgl preview): http://www.gnu.org/software/hp2xx/hp2xx.html

Installing the official release

If you have the Python setuptools utility installed, simply type:

easy_install -U chiplotle

If you don’t have setuptools, follow these steps:

  1. Download the latest Chiplotle release from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Chiplotle.

  2. Untar the downloaded file (e.g. tar xzvf Chiplotle-NNN.tar.gz, where NNN is the version number of the latest release).

  3. Change into the directory created in step 2 (e.g. cd Chiplotle-NNN).

  4. If you’re using Linux, Mac OS X or some other flavor of Unix, enter the command:

    sudo python setup.py install

    at the shell prompt. If you’re using Windows, start up a command shell with administrator privileges and run the command setup.py install.

These commands will install Chiplotle in your Python installation’s site-packages directory. Note that this requires a working internet connection.

Installing the development version

If you’d like to be at the cutting edge of the Chiplotle development use the following alternative:

  1. Install Subversion if you don’t have it already installed (enter svn help to verify this).

  2. Check out Chiplotle’s trunk development like so:

    svn co svn://music.columbia.edu/chiplotle/trunk/ chiplotle-trunk
  3. Make the Python interpreter aware of Chiplotle. There are two ways to do this:

    a. Make a symlink in your Python site-packages directory pointing to the chiplotle-trunk directory previously checked out via Subversion:

    ln -s 'pwd'/chiplotle-trunk/chiplotle SITE-PACKAGES-DIR/chiplotle

    where SITE-PACKAGES-DIR is the Python site-packages directory. In Linux this is usually in /usr/lib/Python2.x/site-packages.

    b. Alternatively you can include the chiplotle-trunk directory in your PYTHONPATH environment variable.

  4. Have your PATH environment variable point to the scripts folder. This will allow you to run Chiplotle and all its accompanying scripts from anywhere in your system.

  5. Download and install NumPy and PySerial.

Table Of Contents

Previous topic

What is Chiplotle?

Next topic

Configuration