I got back from a week's holiday at my parents late Sunday night, which was a great time away although I also was really happy to get back to my own home especially as my Flora kit was here waiting for me!
Last night I finally had time to open the box, and i was really pleased with it, as others have already done an unboxing video I will save uploading another as the kits are the same.
Here is a picture of what I found inside the kit:
Firstly I went to download the software, I went to the Adafruit FLORA getting started guide available here: http://learn.adafruit.com/getting-started-with-flora/overview
I was firstly confused when I could only find Windows and Mac downloads and assumed the Linux link as missing or that I wasn't looking in the correct place, then the further I looked and searched I found that there was no Linux version available, which I can't really understand (or couldn't at first, I think I have since found out this is probably due to USB serial driver issues).
Eventually I found help at http://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=39012 which I followed, I also tried to do the modifications manually by downloading the Mac files and coping them to the correct locations myself, as well as trying with the Arduino software Versions 1.0.3, 1.0.4 & 1.0.5 but non of these created a reliable environment.
I can only recall being able to successfully program the board using the above methods twice (over all the methods and versions that I tried). I think this is because of the way that the board is connected with a virtual serial port which resets during the programming cycle, because the old one has not been released it is given the next port and the programming to the set port fails.
I have previously programmed Arduino Duemilanove, Uno and the Lilypad successfully in Linux, so not being able to program the FLORA is a little disappointing.
I have one more thing to try to get it working in Linux which will be to assign the board it's own port to see if I can get it's own number back again and then successfully program.
To avoid delaying starting the project any more I've booted my laptop in to Windows (and spent half the evening doing updates!), so my current progress is:
*The usual flashing a couple of LEDs through different colours
*Getting a GPS stream of data from the GPS module through the FLORA into the serial monitor
*Extracted just the speed data and location data from the GPS module
I am now recoding my example to compare a fixed location with the current lat lon from the GPS module and then output a difference to the serial monitor. I will do an update once I have finished this as I am now packing up for the night.
