Arduino Q: arduino-flasher-cli could use a few improvements

[KurtE]

Sorry in advance, not sure the best place to report this.
Note: most of this is documented in the forum thread:
https://forum.arduino.cc/t/what-works-using-just-ide-2-and-the-stm32/1410992/8?u=kurte

Yesterday my Q arrived and it took several attempts until I finally got it to the point I could run the blink example.
Was close to wanting to use 🔨

First suggestion: ship the Q with enough of a setup that it does not require the user to need to download
and install using arduino-flasher cli.

Note: I don't have the fastest Internet, so each download attempt takes about an hour, sometimes longer.

On Windows:

Attempt 1: Failed, after about an hour, my C drive ran out of disk space. Abbreviated, wishes I mentioned on forum post:
a) detect this before you try to download and fail.
b) Maybe allow me to specify where to download
c) If an error happens maybe it should somehow check point it and allow me to continue on the next attempt.

Note: @per1234 gave a lot of good suggestions on his response:
https://forum.arduino.cc/t/what-works-using-just-ide-2-and-the-stm32/1410992/9?u=kurte

Edit: It would be great if some of these suggestions were in the main documentation or better yet within the
app. That is the arduino-flasher-cli help would mention that you can use a path to a previously downloaded
image. Likewise maybe: have arduino-flasher-cli download or the like where maybe you can specify version
and and optionally path of where to store it.

Attempt 2: I cleaned out enough on C drive... Finally moved temp to d drive. And tried again.
It downloaded and tried to flash

Norton Virus... Decided it was unsure about the qdl app and decided to study it... Took about a minute, it said then it was fine... But the flashing failed. More on thread mentioned:

WARNING: flashing a new Linux image on the board will erase any existing data you have on it.
Do you want to proceed and flash 20251006-395(latest) on the board? (yes/no)
y
Flashing with qdl
error flashing the board: exit status 1

Would have tried again at that point, but did not want to wait an hour to fail same way... So moved on
to Ubuntu:

Ubuntu 24.04:

Attempt 3: Downloaded and failed, Oops did not catch the part about the Linux and qcserial. I
mistakenly assumed that there would not be issue with latest LTS release... So went through
and black listed and rebooted..

Attempt 4: Downloaded and failed again: Ended up with it could not open the USB Device.

Attempt 4a: I found that on my windows machine, that failed with Norton, that it still had
the downloaded file in the location that @per1234 mentioned, So I copied to thumb drive moved it
to Ubuntu and tried again with it. Failed with USB drive again...

WARNING: flashing a new Linux image on the board will erase any existing data you have on it.
Do you want to proceed and flash /media/kurte/C1ED-A61E/update.tar.zst on the board? (yes/no)
yes
Flashing with qdl
qdl: unable to open USB device
Waiting for EDL device
qdl: unable to open USB device
qdl: unable to open USB device
qdl: unable to open USB device
qdl: unable to open USB device
qdl: unable to open USB device
...

Killed it after several minutes of the above error messages.
Same error as before...
Maybe the old MAC will work:

MAC

Attempt 5: MY old MAC (Early 2013) which runs Running Catalina 10.15.7 that I could still install Arduino 2.x on
I downloaded the arduino-flasher-cli for it and it fails to run as the app was built for MAC OS 12.0...

Suggestion: It should either be documented that the requirements for the Q is for MAC > 12 and/or
should work on same hardware as current Arduino IDE.

At least I did not have to wait for it to download the image before it failed.

Back to windows

Attempt 6: I used the path to where the previous downloaded in Attempt 2, and this time it succeeded.

Back to original suggestions before. But to reiterate, after Attempt 2 failed if I tried to run it again,
it would have been nice if the app noticed that the image was already downloaded and ask if you
would wish to use that image, versus take another hour to download.

[MatteoPologruto]

Hello @KurtE, thanks for using the arduino-flasher-cli and for your feedback!

We have analyzed the issues you encountered and your suggestions, which are greatly appreciated. We are going to work on the following improvements:

• check available disk space before starting an image download and extraction: Check available disk space before downloading/extracting images #17
• add a flag to the flash command to allow the user to specify the path in which the image will be downloaded and/or extracted. If the image is downloaded from the server, it will be deleted afterwards. We are assuming that users who use the command arduino-flasher-cli flash latest want it to run automatically, without the burden of having to manually check where the image was downloaded/extracted to free up some disk space: Check available disk space before downloading/extracting images #17
• add a new download command that will perform the download of the zipped image and save it to the specified path. This way, users will be able to flash the same image multiple times without having to wait for the download to be completed each time: Add download command to download images #18

We are also going to make the arduino-flasher-cli project public soon. Once we do it, this issue will be transferred to the correct repository so that it is easier to keep track of the progress.
Please, feel free to reach out to us if you keep having issues using the tool.

Regards,
Matteo