Digital technologies/Arduino/How to connect to lab computers

Most lab computers in engineering at uOttawa are now virtual machines. This means it is a bit more complicated to connect hardware to them to be used on the computer.

Here are instructions to connect and use Arduinos on lab computers:

1. Login to the computer.
   1. <CTRL><ALT><DEL> will open a popup "VMware Horizon Client", then choose vdi-genie.uottawa.ca
   2. Login using your student credentials.
   3. Choose a virtual machine, currently it is called Windows 10 Fall 2021.
2. When you are logged in you can open the Arduino IDE by searching Arduino in the windows search bar.
3. Plug in the Arduino board to the computer via the USB port.
4. In the task bar, open the hidden icons (^) and find VMware Serial COM Redirection. Click on the icon to display the list of ports on the local machine.
   

   Taskbar hidden icons
5. Select the USB that you want (ex. /dev/ttyUSB0 mapped to COM2) and click Connect.
   

   Connect COM in VMWare
   
   
7. The COM port should now appear in the Arduino IDE under Serial port.
   

   Arduino port