pcDuino is platform that bridges open source software community (Linux) and open source hardware ecosystem (Arduino). It has an Lbuntu desktop GUI. The desktop outputs from the HDMI interface.  What we have learned is that not every people have access to a HDMI monitor.

In this post, we show a quick start for users that don’t have access to a HDMI monitor and serial debug cable.

For a quick start, we need a laptop (in our case, it runs Windows 7), a Ethernet cable, a micro USB power cable (which can run 2A current) and power supply.

Our laptop has WiFi connection. First, we need to  bridge the WiFi connection to pcDuino, so that pcDuino can access the Internet  The detailed steps can be found at here.  Once we are done with bridge, we will see a ‘Network Bridge’ icon as following:

We connect the one end of Ethernet cable to laptop, and the other end to pcDuino.

Now, we power cycle pcDuino. At first, the two LEDs ‘RX/TX’ are off, and when they are both on, that means the system is up running.

We are ready to use a tool named Nmap to scan the local subnet to find the IP address of pcDuino. We install nmap and open it:

The command is “nmap –top-ports 10 192.168.1.*’:

We found the device that has ‘ssh’ service open. It is pcDuino. So the IP address is ‘192.168.1.5’ in our case.

pcDuino 05312013 version has VNC server built-in. We use RealVNC to connect to pcDuino.  The VNC server is ‘192.168.1.5:5900′. Port 5900 is the VNC server port.

Hit ‘Continue’:

The password is ‘ubuntu’.