This isn’t strictly a #hamradio post, but since lots of hams use the Arduino in their shacks, I thought it worth mentioning. Personally, I’m using an Arduino-powered, K3NG keyer here, and play around with them in other projects as well.
The big news is that the Arduino folks have released a beta version of Arduino IDE. Live debugging, code auto-completion, built-in help, and a streamlined programming workflow are just some of the features available in this new release.
Code help seems like the most useful feature to me. As you type, a menu appears showing what valid options are available to complete your line of code. Hovering over any function in your code will also reveal what it does and what parameters are required.
The new debugging tools also look really useful. Instead of relying on outputs to the serial monitor, you’ll now be able to add breakpoints, step through a program line-by-line, monitor variables as your program is executing, and even modify the values of those variables. That’s pretty powerful stuff.
I haven’t yet installed this on my RPi4 development system, but will be doing so the next time I fire it up for some Arduino hacking. You can get the latest beta version by going to the Arduino downloads page.
Dave New, N8SBE says
I’d say “it’s about time”. Their IDE has always struck me as a bit primitive. Wonder how much overhead in terms of time and space these features will cost on the target platform. IIRC, the Arduino runtime normally extracts 2K of overhead in terms of space. On a small (32K) platform, that can be quite a bit. Hans of QRPlabs has always written assembly direct to the hardware, because he needed all 32K of the code space.