bojtospeter / ktechlab

an IDE for microcontrollers and electronics

KTechLab

KTechLab is an IDE for microcontrollers and electronics. It supports circuit simulation, program development for microcontrollers and simulating the programmed microcontroller together with its application circuit.

Introduction

Resources

• KTechLab on github: https://github.com/ktechlab

• KTechLab on sourceforge

  • wiki: http://ktechlab.sourceforge.net
  • project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ktechlab
  • project page for developers: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ktechlab/develop

• the official communucation channel is hosted on sourceforge, it is called ktechlab-devel

  • link to archives of the list: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=ktechlab-devel

• on IRC, KTechLab developers regularly join the channel #ktechlab, on FreeNode

• source code repositories: see Getting the source section, below

Getting the source

KTechLab's source code is located in GIT repositories.

The official repository is located on github:

• https://github.com/ktechlab/ktechlab

• the master branch contains the latest tested development code, while other branches might contain untested/unstable code

Other notable GIT repositories are located on sourceforge:

• main KTechLab repository:

  • git://ktechlab.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/ktechlab/ktechlab
  • contains the contents of the previously used SVN repository

• developers' own repositories:

  • git://ktechlab.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/ktechlab/ktl-alonzotg
  • git://ktechlab.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/ktechlab/ktl-j_ohny_b
  • git://ktechlab.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/ktechlab/ktl-zoltan_p
    • the master branch should have the same content as the official master branch from github
  • these repositories contain work-in-progress code, which is supposed to be merged in the master branch on github

Checking out from GIT can be performed with the following commands:

git clone git://github.com/ktechlab/ktechlab.git
cd ktechlab
git checkout -b master --track origin/master

Building and Running

Required dependencies

• Qt4 -dev
• cmake
• glib -dev

Optional dependencies

• KDE4 libraries -dev
• KDevPlatform libraries -dev
  • NOTE: without the following two components, only the unit tests will be built; those are not useful for end-users
• GPSim -dev, for microcontroller support
• Eigen2 -dev, for unit tests; generally it is not needed for builds targeted to end-users, but it is useful for development

Since KDE4, all Makefiles in KDE projects are generated using CMake. After checking out the source (see Getting the source), here is how to compile and install KTechLab. CMkake is not a run-time dependency of KTechLab.

1. By using a terminal, navigate to the top-level source-directory

2. Run the shell script simple-setup.sh. This command compiles KTechLab into the directory simple-build, installs it into the directory simple-install and sets up the user-specific settings (syscoca, mime database) for the current user.

     sh simple-setup.sh
   

3. Launch KTechLab by running the script simple-launch.sh

     sh simple-launch.sh
   

KTechLab should start running at this point. If this simple method of launching KTechLab does not work, please contact the developers, because you have found a bug.

Running by multiple users with same build/install directory

It is possible to run an already compiled and installed version of KTechLab by multiple users. In order to do this, run the script ktechlab-user-setup.sh from the simple-install/bin/ directory

     sh simple/install/bin/ktechlab-user-setup.sh

Then you can launch KTechLab as usual

    sh simple-launch.sh

Running a build when the source/build/install directory has been moved

It the source directory has been moved, then the setup procedure has to be rerun. This is due to the fact that in the launch scripts of KTechLab, absolute directory paths are generated. The compilation step should be a lot faster than previously, because the source files have not been changed, so the existing build is just verified, not recreated.

     sh simple-setup.sh
     sh simple-launch.sh

Developing with KDevelop 4

See the guide doc/devel/devel-with-kdevelop4.md.

Have fun with KTechLab!