The Battle of IDEs
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Each board comes with its own IDE. Most of them share the same interface provided by Processing. Also, most of the language is common thank to the Wiring framework.
I often refer to all those IDEs as Processing-based Wiring-derived. The main benefit of the Processing-based Wiring-derived IDEs relies on being OS-agnostic. The IDEs run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. The problem is, each board with its IDE has its own idiosyncrasies. Although a 8-bit MCU doesn't work the same way as a 16- or 32-bit one, other differences are hardly understandable. When all IDEs accept [u]int{8|16|32|64}_t as uint8_t, why one sports its own [u]int{8|16|32|64} as uint8 instead? Worse, some boards are more equal than other, with two IDEs! |
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Paying tribute to the real pioneers: Processing and Wiring
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Who were the real pioneers who made it all possible
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Processing was developed by Casey Reas and Ben Fry and provides the IDE all the boards are using. It is also fully documented. Initially featuring Java, it explores new languages like Python with Processing.py and JavaScript with p5*js.
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Wiring was developed as a thesis by Hernando Barragán and provided the framework used by all the boards. The Wiring framework is fully documented with a whole site Developers Reference. Wiring is currently working on the next generation object-based framework, Wiring++.
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Choose your colour!
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The Arduino IDE for the Arduino boards comes in two flavours, 0023 and 1.0, unfortunately with significant differences between both.
Hence the two repositories:
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MPIDE for chipKIT boards sticks with the Wiring / Arduino 0023 repository.
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Apart from being a framework, Wiring is also an IDE which supports the Wiring boards.
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Energia RC1 for LaunchPad boards was released in May 2012.
It is compliant with the new Arduino 1.0 repository. The latest release, called Energia MT —with MT for multi-tasking— is built on TI-RTOS and provides threads and synchronisation mechanisms. |
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Arduino vs. Arduino
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There are now 2 Arduino organisations with 2 different websites and 2 different IDEs:
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Arduino 1.6 by Arduino.CC / Genuino is the new stable release of the framework.
Version 1.6.1 by Arduino.CC / Genuino is compatible with previous releases, 1.0.6 and 1.5.8. However, releases 1.6.2 and later break that compatibility. |
Arduino 1.7 by Arduino.ORG supports all the Arduino boards and the new Arduino M0 and M0 Pro boards.
It is compatible with previous releases 1.0.6, 1.5.8 and 1.6 up to 1.6.1. |
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Arduino.CC IDE 1.6.5 and Boards Manager
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Starting release 1.6.5, the Arduino.CC IDE includes a Boards Manager for downloading and installing additional boards. It relies on a list of URLs set in the Preferences pane. A similar process deals with libraries.
Most of the boards manufacturers rely on the Boards Manager, including Adafruit, chipKIT, Cosa, Digistump, ESP8266, Intel, MediaTek, Little Robot Friends, Mediatek, panStamp, RedBear and RFduino. |
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A new window lists all the boards available, already installed or ready for installation, based on a set of URLs.
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United again!
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As a consequence of of the merger of Arduino and Arduino: Together Again, the new release 1.8.0 of the Arduino IDE support all the Arduino and Genuino boards, including the Arduino Zero, M0, M0 Pro and Tian.
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Release 2.0
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End of 2021, Arduino released version 2.0 of the IDE, based on new foundations. This release relies on Eclipse Theia, an IDE of the same generation of Visual Studio Code or GitHub Atom.
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Using conditional #include
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Most of the boards rely on the same framework, with no need to learn a new dialect.
The same code runs fine on most boards, provided some conditional #include are inserted into the code, as shown on the right. The Boards Manager is the de facto new standard with an improved ease of use for installing new boards. Interesting extensions, like Cosa for AVR boards and like Energia Multi-Tasking and Galaxia for LaunchPads, bring new perspectives. |
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Posted:
Updated: 27 May 2021, 03 Jan 2022
