Arduino have released the latest version of their Integrated Development Environment (IDE), Version 2.0 and it is a big step up from the previous release, boasting plenty of new features to help you to develop your code more easily.

As the de-facto way for beginners to get into programming hardware, more experienced users have sometimes complained about what they see as the over-simplistic IDE — even lacking relatively basic features such as autocomplete. The new version provides this, and much more besides.

The press-release from Arduino offers a few clues to the main features, but the real detail is tucked away in a range of new tutorials, designed to get you up to speed with the new look.

The main screen is organised differently, to show off the new capabilities and to make development faster and easier. The new “Remote Sketchbook” has been integrated closely with the Arduino Cloud, to allow for easy switching between computers during development. V2.0 will pick up any Cloud sketches automatically, while computers using the previous versions of the IDE can still access the sketches via the Web Editor as before.

The Serial Plotter can now be used at the same time as the text Serial Monitor, rather than having to choose one or the other. In addition, there is a host of new Debug functionality for those devices that support it. This works with the usual In-Circuit Emulators (such as the Atmel ICE), but also natively with newer Arduino boards like the Arduino Zero without any additional hardware. The debugger gives you access to powerful features like Breakpoints, Step-Into and Step-Over to really understand what your code is doing.

Installation is straightforward, and will automatically pull in any libraries and sketches that you created in previous versions of the Arduino software to ease the transition.

There’s a lot to like in the new IDE, but we expect it will take a little while to discover and use all the new features effectively.  Some of them are carry-overs from the “Arduino Pro IDE” that we covered a few years ago, but it’s great to see the software evolve and improve over time.

Have you tried new new IDE yet?  What are your thoughts on how it compares to the older version, or other development environments?  Let us know in the comments.

Thanks to [cardboardBaron] for the tip.

Join us on Wednesday, April 21 at noon Pacific for the AVR Reverse Engineering Hack Chat with Uri Shaked!

We’ve all become familiar with the Arduino ecosystem by now, to the point where it’s almost trivially easy to whip up a quick project that implements almost every aspect of its functionality strictly in code. It’s incredibly useful, but we tend to lose sight of the fact that our Arduino sketches represent a virtual world where the IDE and a vast selection of libraries abstract away a lot of the complexity of what’s going on inside the AVR microcontroller.

While it’s certainly handy to have an environment that lets you stand up a system in a matter of minutes, it’s hardly the end of the story. There’s a lot to be gained by tapping into the power of assembly programming on the AVR, and learning how to read the datasheet and really run the thing. That was the focus of Uri Shaked’s recent well-received HackadayU course on AVR internals, and it’ll form the basis of this Hack Chat. Then again, since Uri is also leading a Raspberry Pi Pico and RP2040 course on HackadayU in a couple of weeks, we may end up talking about that too. Or we may end up chatting about something else entirely! It’s really hard to where this Hack Chat will go, given Uri’s breadth of interests and expertise, but we’re pretty sure of one thing: it won’t be boring. Make sure you log in and join the chat — where it goes is largely up to you.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, April 21 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

In an age of streaming media it’s easy to forget the audio CD, but they still remain as a physical format from the days when the “Play” button was not yet the “Pay” button. A CD player may no longer be the prized possession it once was, but it’s still possible to dabble in the world of 120 mm polycarbonate discs if you have a fancy for it. It’s something [Daniel1111] has done with his Arduino CD player, which uses the little microcontroller board to control a CD-ROM drive via its IDE bus.

The project draws heavily from the work of previous experimenters, notably ATAPIDUINO, but it extends them by taking its audio from the drive’s S/PDIF output. A port expander drives the IDE interface, while a Cirrus Logic WM8805 S/PDIF transceiver handles the digital audio and converts it to an I²S stream. That in turn is fed to a Texas Instruments PCM5102 DAC, which provides a line-level audio output. All the code and schematic can be found in a GitHub repository.

To anyone who worked in the CD-ROM business back in the 1990s this project presses quite a few buttons, though perhaps not enough to dig out all those CDs again. It would be interesting to see whether the I²S stream could be lifted from inside the drive directly, or even if the audio data could be received via the IDE bus. If you’d like to know a bit more about I²S , we have an article for you.

We’ve released the first prototype of one of the most requested Arduino Pro IDE features: the Arduino Debugger

Key features

• executes your Arduino sketch step-by-step while it’s running on your Arduino board!
• pause your sketch execution placing breakpoints
• inspect variables values during execution

Initially supporting SAMD21 boards the Arduino Pro IDE debugger is available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux64.

You can try the Arduino Debugger as a feature of the latest Alpha preview version for the Arduino Pro IDE; more details like tutorials etc will follow on soon!

Today, we are excited to announce the arrival of the Arduino IDE 1.8.12.

Wow! Another release just after two weeks, you ask?

Well, we fixed some serious bugs related to the compiler, and more importantly, we had to take a step back with respect to the transition to the new Java Virtual Machine from OpenJDK. Since we had received so many reports from our users, we decided to do a release with the old JVM in order to have a bit more time to properly handle those issues and at the same time guarantee a better experience to our users.

As usual, if you are curious, you can find the full changelog and contributors in the release notes here.

Our dev team has some more exciting news to share: Arduino Pro IDE v0.0.4-alpha has been released.

Highlights include:

• Automatic Arduino language server (LS) recovery. From now on, if the LS process terminates, it restarts automatically.
• Updated the bundled Clang version to 9.0.0. Bundled Clangd into the application for all supported platforms.
• Better keybinding support for the upload, verify, and the serial monitor.

You can download the latest version here.

We’re excited to announce that Arduino IDE 1.8.11 is here!

In addition to the usual load of bugfixes and small improvements under the hood, the latest version includes:

• Improved support for Mac OS X (the app is now notarized and strictly follows the latest OS X recommended security guidelines)
• A “send text” command within the serial plotter (so you can interact with the board while plotting data!)
• Better sketch build time
• Updated AVR core and WiFi firmware

As always, we must thank our amazing community for their incredible support and contributions. The complete list of changes and contributors can be found in the full changelog.

Last weekend we announced that we’re working on the new Arduino Pro IDE and we got a huge response! Let’s take a deeper look at what is in store.

Here are the choices you have to develop code from Arduino today — some you might know, others you might not — and how they paved the way for a brand new IDE. 

Arduino Create

The quickest way to get started developing for Arduino today. 

A simple, modern web app version of the Arduino IDE — with boards and libraries available without needing an install. Just open your web browser, head to create.arduino.cc/editor to get started.

In the creation of the new Arduino Pro IDE, we chose to build on the Theia framework. As Theia is based on Electron, using web technologies, it allows us to unify the front-end development work and user experience between the web-based Arduino Create and the Arduino Pro IDE desktop application. Magic!

Arduino CLI

Designed for power users; everything you need from the command line.

Arduino CLI is a single binary command line solution that provides builder, boards/library manager, uploader, discovery and many other tools needed to use any Arduino compatible board and platforms. You can include this in Makefiles or use it to add Arduino support to whatever development flow you prefer. Whether you use Atom, Eclipse, Emacs, Vim, VSCode, or are even building your own tools, Arduino CLI makes this possible. You can try it today at arduino-cli.

Arduino CLI is already hard at work in the backend of Arduino Create enabling day-to-day development for over one million users. The daemon mode support and gRPC interface means the User Interface doesn’t even need to be running on the same machine as the Arduino CLI — this opens the potential for remote build and deploy to Linux machines such as Raspberry Pi. Third party boards are also supported today through a configuration file. The backend of Arduino Pro IDE is also based on Arduino CLI, naturally.

Arduino IDE

A simple classic.

The simplicity of the classic Arduino IDE has made it one of the most popular in the world — with over 15 millions downloads per year. If you want to develop code for Arduino and prefer not to use the online tool Arduino Create you can get started today by downloading the classic Arduino IDE application. 

We felt it was very important to maintain continuity with this look and feel in the Arduino Pro IDE. For this reason it has a mode identical to the classic Arduino IDE that millions of you are familiar with — the difference being if you want advanced mode, you have that too!

Arduino Pro IDE

More features for advanced users (still in development).

Which brings us the upcoming Arduino Pro IDE! This is a product still in development, but we’ve opened up the alpha binary so early users can try it out and give feedback – the source code will be released at a later date. Because it is not yet ready for production release you must expect bugs and unimplemented features. (If you just want to get your Arduino project running, we’d recommend Arduino Create or the classic Arduino IDE for now.)

However, if you want to be the first to try it and give us feedback to help shape the product as we develop it, please give it a try! The preview is already available for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

Initial feature list

• Dual Mode; Classic Arduino look and Pro (File System view)
  • The tool only reveals advanced features when you need them
• Modern fully featured development environment 
  • Modern look, multi-panel IDE with integrated file system view
  • Designed for developing larger, multi-file, repository-based projects
• Debugger coming soon!
  • Set breakpoints, view trace, step through execution and much more
  • Debug your application without affecting timing with a Serial.print()
• Open to third party plug-ins and boards coming soon!
  • Add third party boards, libraries and IDE function plug-ins
• Support for additional languages other than C++ coming soon!
  • Exactly what it says, and it’s going to be exciting!
• New Board Manager, Library Manager and Serial Monitor
  • All the features you expect in a cleaner more modern environment
• Basic Auto Completion (Arm targets only)

• Git Integration

• Dark Mode
  • Easier on the eyes

That’s all for now

We’ve been working to improve our tools and give the community choices that fit their way of working – be that web-based, desktop application or command-line. The Arduino Pro IDE builds on these to bring something new — we’re excited to share the alpha preview with you and look forward to your feedback!

Live from Maker Faire Rome on Saturday, October 19th at 16.00 CET, Massimo Banzi and Luca Cipriani will push the button to release the new Arduino Pro IDE (alpha) — watch this space.

The hugely popular Arduino IDE software is easy-to-use for beginners, yet flexible enough for advanced users. Millions of you have used it as your everyday tool to program projects and applications. We’ve listened to your feedback though, and it’s time for a new enhanced version with features to appeal to the more advanced developers amongst you.

We are very excited to be releasing an “alpha” version of a completely new Development Environment for Arduino, the Arduino Pro IDE. 

The main features in this initial alpha release of the new Pro IDE are:

• Modern, fully featured development environment 
• Dual mode, classic mode (identical to the classic Arduino IDE) and pro mode (file system view)
• New Board Manager 
• New Library Manager
• Board List
• Basic auto completion (Arm targets only)
• Git integration
• Serial Monitor
• Black theme

But the new architecture opens the door to features that the Arduino community have been requesting like these that will be following on soon:

• Sketch synchronisation with Arduino Create Editor
• Debugger
• Fully open to third party plug-ins 
• Support for additional languages than C++

The new Arduino Pro IDE is based on the latest technologies as follows: 

• Arduino CLI used in daemon mode is providing all the main Arduino features.
• Eclipse Theia the frontend of the application is based on this Open Source IDE.
• Electron the framework behind Eclipse Theia, allows the use of web technologies on desktop environments.

Available in Windows, Mac OSX and Linux64 versions; we need your help in improving the product. Before releasing the source code to move out of the alpha, we would greatly appreciate your feedback. Like all things in the Arduino community, we grow and develop together through your valued contributions. Please test the Arduino Pro IDE to it’s breaking point, we want to hear all the good and bad things you find. We’re open to recommendations for additional features, as well as hearing about any bugs you may find – there’s bound to be a few as it is an alpha version afterall!

Versions (released from 16.00 CET on Saturday, October 19th)

Arduino Pro IDE Windows v0.0.1-alpha.preview

Arduino Pro IDE OSX v0.0.1-alpha.preview

Arduino Pro IDE Linux v0.0.1-alpha.preview

So give it a go and let us know of any feature requests or bugs at: https://github.com/arduino/arduino-pro-ide/issues

For those of you who love and cherish the classic Arduino IDE, don’t worry it will continue to be available forever.

Hey Arduiners,

Today we are releasing IDE 1.8.10 and you should try it because it’s awesome! With the support of our incredible community, we’ve been improving a lot of (small and not so small) things.

Besides taking a look at the complete changelog, we’d like to point out one outstanding contribution that we received during this dev cycle.

Our friend Joe Wegner from APH reached out to us with a very clear plan on how to improve the IDE’s accessibility with some very convenient patches. With the help of co-founder Tom Igoe and ITP alumnus and research resident Jim Schmitz, we’ve started targeting some of the most problematic components that used to interact badly with screen readers (popups, links, lists not entirely navigable by keyboard) while also adding a plethora of accessibility descriptions to components that were basically hidden for blind and visually impaired users.

To keep things clean, Wegner added a checkbox under Preference panel to enable some particular optimizations for screen readers (like transforming links into buttons so they can be reached using the TAB key).

We hope it is the start of a lasting collaboration to make Arduino truly available for everyone willing to learn and hack with us.