[HN Gopher] Arduino IDE 2.0
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Arduino IDE 2.0
Author : rcarmo
Score : 60 points
Date : 2022-09-28 21:33 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.arduino.cc)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.arduino.cc)
| funnym0nk3y wrote:
| Is there any advantage in using this over using vscode with
| platform.io?
| jon-wood wrote:
| If you're comfortable using platform.io, probably not, you're
| not the target audience for the Arduino IDE, which I think is
| much more focused on people who are just picking up electronics
| and embedded development.
| pjmlp wrote:
| No for professional coders, yes for beginners.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| I think this is more targeted at beginners or at
| hardware/electronics people that have little software
| experience. In those cases vscode + platform.io is probably
| more daunting than a simple arduino editor with a button to
| flash your code to the chip.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I feel like the complexity is being oversold a bit here, I
| agree Arduino is very beginner friendly, but PlatformIO is
| very much a "Click and Play" development experience
|
| For an _absolute_ beginner PlatformIO is off the beaten path
| so I 'd say skip it to start, but if you have _any_
| familiarity with traditional IDEs, PlatformIO is probably 90%
| as beginner friendly while being more of a traditional
| development environment.
|
| 2.0 being based on Monaco will help bridge the gap, but it's
| clear that they're still going for a _very_ pared down
| experience in the Arduino IDE. Other comments comparing it to
| Notepad are about right... it 's very easy to get into
| Notepad but can be limiting once you get past the initial
| hump
| skybrian wrote:
| I'm using PlatformIO now, but in my experience the
| installation experience is hit and miss, due to lack of
| feedback while downloading and installing things. It just
| hangs, and you don't know if it failed.
|
| A workaround is to not follow their suggestion to install
| from the VS Code plugin and install the command line tools
| instead.
|
| Also, serial monitoring and plotting isn't very good. I
| ended up writing my own: https://serialviz.skybrian.com/
|
| That said, package management is more sane. Having a
| platformio.ini file that you can check in helps with
| reproducibility.
| Saris wrote:
| It's simple and easy to get started with, if you're already
| using platform.io then there's not really any advantage to
| going back.
| erwinh wrote:
| In my first years as design student I spent quite some time
| programming in the Arduino IDE because it worked pretty much
| out of the box plug-n-play.
|
| Happy to see an integrated rich serial data plotter. One of my
| tricks used to be to do a: Serial.print(inputVal * 100 * "-")
| to get a basic visual 'chart' stream going to test sensor
| inputs and the like.
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| Maybe it depends on your preferences. As someone who enjoys
| "suckless" tools on Linux, it makes me happy when I can avoid
| VS Code, however, many embedded projects out there just default
| to Platform IO. A simpler Arduino IDE is an advantage for me.
| With a more capable Arduino IDE, maybe there will be less VS
| Code dependence.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _The Arduino IDE 2.0 beta_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27123410 - May 2021 (120
| comments)
| tehwebguy wrote:
| Oh this is cool. I would probably rather just have even better
| tooling for VS Code but this rules. Super glad Teensy support is
| on the way too.
| sieabah wrote:
| There shouldn't be any reason an open source hardware company
| should support something like vscode themselves.
|
| It takes one update from vscode to break everything and your
| SOL.
| supernovae wrote:
| vs code is open source and it works perfectly fine and there
| are tons of plugins for micro controller programming and
| support.
|
| still, happy to see this update.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Maybe unrelated, but I must say it again: we need an arduino for
| the fpga world.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| This feels like a dump question but what is stopping the
| Arduino from being used as a fgpa?
| eric__cartman wrote:
| You can't emulate a real FPGA with a microcontroller
| guhidalg wrote:
| That's true but I think that's not the only reason.
| Programming an FPGA isn't as simple as writing and
| deploying compiled code, you have to write in a hardware
| specification language.
|
| Actually you can get the same experience with an FPGA if
| you pay for the FPGA development tools, maybe what you're
| asking for is a low cost version of Quartus or similar
| tools. I would like it if that existed but I fear FPGA
| makers deliberately want to keep their tooling expensive
| and hard-to-learn to promote lock-in.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I think it is possible since you could load an sketch that
| emulates a fpga. Nevertheless it would surely be
| inconvenient. Probably performance would be sub-par.
| jmole wrote:
| i think what you mean here is, we need a better IDE for the
| fpga world.
|
| building a simple hardware dev board is a straightforward
| exercise.
|
| building an IDE that lets a novice do anything useful on an
| fpga, outside of a very basic state machine, is an entirely
| different problem in both scope and structure.
|
| The vast majority of HDL blocks you'd need to make such a thing
| more useful than a $4 microcontroller are closed source,
| nontrivial to build, and require careful thought in terms of
| integrating them into a workable system, not to mention very
| specific and application dependent PHYs: Things like HDMI,
| ethernet, USB, etc.
|
| I think what most people would prefer is a fast general purpose
| CPU with pluggable, low-latency memory mapped peripherals
| without the hassle of having to know linux systems programming
| to make it work.
| teamonkey wrote:
| > building a simple hardware dev board is a straightforward
| exercise.
|
| I would argue that you can make your own microcontroller dev
| board easily enough too. An RP2040 or similar, a USB
| programmer, some kind of voltage converter, etc.
|
| The joy that Arduino bright to microprocessors was that it
| was a device that was useful for a lot of projects straight
| out of the box, accessible to those with only high school
| knowledge of circuits or programming.
| trotFunky wrote:
| Well, there's an Arduino FPGA board : the MKR Vidor 4000[0]
|
| However I'm not sure how much people use it and if it really
| has the simplicity that Arduino brought to tinkering with
| microcontrollers. I read and hear a lot that the FPGA dev
| tooling is usually not really great to use and very vendor-
| specific, but it's something I haven't tinkered with yet so I
| don't really know much !
|
| [0]: https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-mkr-vidor-4000
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Well, there's an Arduino FPGA board : the MKR Vidor 4000
|
| It's an Arduino with an FPGA on it, yes. But the FPGA is
| practically a hood ornament: there is _no support whatsoever_
| for building gateware in the Arduino IDE, only for using a
| set of prebuilt demonstration bitstreams, and what little
| documentation Arduino has provided on using the FPGA (e.g.
| https://docs.arduino.cc/tutorials/mkr-vidor-4000/vidor-
| quart...) is extremely vague and is missing a lot of critical
| information.
|
| You're much better off with a dedicated FPGA development
| board. Arduino hasn't brought anything useful to the table
| here.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I always felt the Arduino IDE was lacking some features I would
| consider "basic" for any IDE. I'm glad to see they seem to be
| putting a lot more work into it lately. I think these features
| will improve usability tremendously.
|
| When I was doing a lot more Arduino programming ~5 years ago I
| ended up using Visual Studio with some pretty good extensions.
| The Arduino "IDE" really felt more like a basic text editor with
| an upload button at the time.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Whoa that serial plotter looks pretty damn awesome
| debdut wrote:
| they could have just created a good vscode extension :(
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