One of the biggest issues in getting Sniff out to a wider audience has been that until now Sniff has been Unix only: it runs on Mac/Linux and Pi. While we recognise that most schools are running Windows. It's not that we didn't see that as a problem, but rather there were several very pragmatic reasons for developing on Unix over Windows:
- Portability: Sniff runs essentially unchanged on all Unix platforms
- Developer Tool: Unix is just better set up to develop an system like this. It's easier for us, but also easier for users: Apple/Pi/Linux provide all the pieces users need, whereas MS don't.
- Developer Skills: We like Unix. It's a better platform, so we develop for that first.
However we've finally found the resources to develop a Windows build. Release 11 includes initial support for Windows. In fact R11 comes in two favours: Generic and Windows. The generic version runs on all platforms, including Windows but if all the text files are all in "Unix" format, which may cause problems (If you've worked on cross platform systems before you'll understand), so we've also made a Windows only release which will work better, but only includes the Windows components.
On all platforms you need a C compiler, but this is trickier on Windows that Unix platforms, as its not included by default (and MS charge for their Visual Studio, while Apple give away Xcode for free!). However we can use MinGW. This is a Windows version of the tools usually used to develop for Linux. You'll need to download it from www.mingw.org and install it, along with the included Msys tools. Once you've done this you're read to go!
Download the Sniff Windows version, and unzip it in the MSys home folder (something like c:\mingw\msys\1.0\home\username). This is an odd place to work but it's how MinGW likes to do things, then open an MSys Shell (as you set it up when you installed MinGW), and typing "ls" should show you the Sniff folder. "cd Sniff", then type ". ./setup" just as you would on any other platform to get everything setup!
From there on everything's the same. Use the MSys shell to compile and run the examples using the same commands you'd use in Unix (cd examples/Generic; sniff hello.sniff; ./hello). Arduino works (using uno-sniff). Most of the examples that previously were in the Unix folder are now in a folder called Hosted, as they run fine on Win32.
Once you've compiled a program with Sniff for Windows, its a regular Windows program so you can run it from the DOS CMD prompt, or even double click on it to make it go!
As this is the first release for Windows, there are likely to be a few glitches and problems, simply because the platform is different (and and of course there are different versions of Windows), so any feedback is appreciated.
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