Notes:

========== Arduino/LEDDummyFeeder

• Prevent reset on serial traffic by connecting a 120 ohm resistor to RESET and 5V
  • Note that this will prevent uploading while the resistor is connected.
  • From http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Main/DisablingAutoResetOnSerialConnection

========== Arduino/DogFeeder

• Resistor trick above is NOT necessary on account of reseting on restart not being an issue.

========== Rails/feeder

• Roll yourself a private key using (0..31).collect { ('a'..'z').to_a[rand(26)] }.join and throw it in (the gitignored file) config/initializers/constants.rb

  idea from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1107782/wheres-the-best-place-to-define-a-constant-in-a-ruby-on-rails-application/1108064#1108064

  along with the serial port you are using. Your constants.rb file should end up looking something like:

PRIVATE_KEY = "dontactuallyusethisstringyoupillock" SERIAL_PORT = "/dev/ttyUSB0"

• Typical commands to use after cloning the repo:
  • [Create constants.rb]
  • bundle install
  • rake db:migrate
  • rails server -d

========== Notes on getting feeder running on Windows

Used the Windows installer from http://railsinstaller.org/ It worked amazingly well.

Followed these instructions:

http://curiosity.roguepenguin.net/?p=35

Which may have built and installed an older, Windows compatible binary version of the gem (0.6).

feeder was complaining that it couldn't find serialport 1.0.4, so I renamed the Gemfile.lock to Gemfile.lock.bak, thinking I'd have to run bundler again or something. But on a lark, I just tried rake db:migrate again, and it worked. Some part of this excruciating process probably wasn't necessary.