We always stress the fact that Arduino is not only a matter of hardware. Arduino has two other important pieces, the software and the community. We recently wrote about an improved Arduino Software (IDE) and how we moved from nightly builds to hourly builds, thanks to the help of our programmers and contributors. Now we want to add more power to the community and its capacity to create amazing projects.

In the past year we have been incredibly busy designing a new Arduino web-based tool, Arduino Create. It’s an important step in the Arduino ecosystem that (we hope) is going to change the way you interact with your projects and the community.

Over the years we gathered a lot of feedback both when running workshops in schools and maker spaces, and when reading comments on the Forum and other social networks. We understood we needed to provide the Arduino community with a more modern and flexible tool to write code, a more integrated way of accessing content and learning while doing, an easier way to setup and configure tools and boards, and a better way to share Arduino projects.

More and more products traditionally delivered as desktop apps are being moved to online platforms, and we see an opportunity in this. Arduino Create is a set of online tools that will make working with Arduino even more seamless and smooth.

First of all you will be able to write code and upload sketches to any Arduino board directly from the browser with the Arduino Web Editor (IDE), without having to install anything. Your Sketchbook will be stored on the Arduino Cloud and will be accessible from any device. The Getting Started app will allow you to easily configure and setup tools and boards available around you. Services provided by partners such as Temboo will be just one click away and better integrated with your workflow.

Arduino Create will simplify building a project as a whole, without having to switch between many different tools to manage the all the aspects of whatever you are making.
In this past year we focused our effort mainly in the Arduino Web Editor, but we really want to concentrate on content next, providing you with a curated set of projects and tutorials to get you inspired.

Our team, together with ToDo, developed a pilot version of Arduino Create for the Arduino TRE board.
We did a lot of research to design and develop this new web-platform right. We started with paper prototyping and co-creation sessions in the local Fablab, 6-months later we had around 150 Arduino TRE beta-testers giving us feedback on both the software, and the overall user experience of the product. 8 months into the project, in the Arduino Workshop area within Maker Faire Rome, we conducted about 25 user-testing sessions to refine some usability details. Talking with a great variety of people is always key in our design and development process, since Arduino has to fit the needs of users with a big skill-set range, from total beginners to experts.

We are now in the process of making Arduino Create reachable by anyone on a browser via www.arduino.cc. This post is a sneak peak on this effort.

Here some of the features of Arduino Create (some still in the works*):

• Integration with the Arduino account, just sign in to access the web IDE
• Your Sketchbook on the Arduino Cloud, available anytime from any device
• A guided walkthrough to setup and configure Arduino Create for the first time
• Latest version of the Arduino Web Editor (based on ACE), the board cores, and the libraries, always available without having to install anything
• Auto-discovery of boards and ports available around you, selectable in one single dropdown
• Examples presented with Schematics and Layout details
• A Readme tab included in each sketch so that you can add some project’s details, if comments on your code gets too verbose
• Ability to add custom Schematics and Layout PNGs to your sketch, so that you have in one place the all basic elements of your project
• Better integration with Language Reference* and Glossary
• Ability to share a sketch and embed it in your webpage or blog*
• Notification area to be always up-to-date with the latest news (new library or core, new feature available, etc)*
• Video tutorials and Help resources available directly within the Editor*

Of course we will continue to develop and improve the desktop Arduino IDE, this online version will give us an opportunity to test new features and provide users with a more cohesive experience when making projects with Arduino.

In mid June we plan to start a beta-testing program of Arduino Create, stay tuned for updates!

With the release of Arduino 1.6.2 we turned a page in the history of Arduino:  The “old” IDE 1.0.x is replaced by a more modern and more modular development environment which introduced a lot of usability improvements for Makers.

The community responded energetically to these new features by packaging up cores for other processors and boards that are not officially supported by Arduino. There is so much cool stuff being done out there that we figured out we wanted to make them available to the whole Arduino community.

We want a more open Arduino development environment where the community contribution can be made available more easily to all the users alongside the officially supported code.

To do this we are adding new features in the next release of the Arduino IDE that will allow adding community contributed cores just by adding a line to the IDE configuration. This will allow these community contributions to be made available simply and quickly. In the future we’ll also make it possible for those contributions to be hosted on our servers for quicker deployment.

We also decided to get rid of the popup notifying users they were using a non-certified board. Our issues with a specific manufacturer are now well known in the community that the popup just got in the way our desire to be more open and making life simpler for people. This change is already active in the current Arduino IDE.

A lot of people use boards that do not contribute back to Arduino and, honestly, we rather work with whoever wants to positively collaborate with us rather than annoy people.
We have added a “donation” option for the people who would like to contribute to the development and support of the whole Arduino ecosystem. When you download the IDE you’ll be asked if you want to donate, you can skip it or chose an amount.

In roughly 6 weeks we had more than 1 million downloads of the Arduino IDE: it’s an amazing number that we want to see grow constantly so if you appreciate what we do you can support our work directly even if your board manufacturers don’t.

This is just the beginning of a new phase where we want to make the Arduino IDE truly everybody’s development environment.

In the meantime if you have suggestions on how to further open up Arduino please post a comment!

Massimo Banzi

The Arduino IDE is a collection of modules written in different programming languages and available for three operating systems: Windows, Mac OSX and GNU/Linux.

Every time you download the Arduino IDE, you are actually downloading the result of a careful packaging process, intended to make the download as small as possible and to give you the easiest possible out-of-the-box user experience.

The process is fully automated and it’s repeated every time we publish a new feature, or we fix a bug you helped us find, or we merge code you contributed.

The resulting IDEs are called Nightly Builds: they contain the latest and greatest (and, possibly, buggiest) from the Arduino IDE.

We started delivering Nightly Builds about two years ago as a way to ease your life in giving us feedback: you don’t need to be a developer to try a Nightly.
You may have read replies to github issues saying something like “Your issue has been fixed. It will be available with the next nightly build“.

But sometimes nightly is just not enough, because you can’t wait to try what we coded following your suggestions or to see your contribution becoming available to everyone.

So welcome Hourly Builds!

By the time we push new code for the Arduino IDE, it will take at most an hour for the build to be ready to be downloaded and tried. This will allow a much more fluent conversation and prompt feedback when solving issues and implementing new features.

We are very pleased to announce the availability of Intel® Galileo and Edison boards support with the Arduino IDE Boards Manager.

If you’ve already installed the Arduino IDE 1.6.3 (or newer), you are already set!

Just click on menu Tools > Board > Boards Manager to find both Galileo and Edison listed and available for download. Click on one of the list, then click Install. Wait a couple of minutes for the IDE to download and unpack all the needed tools and voilà: Board menu will list the Intel board of your choice.

A new version of the Arduino IDE (1.6.3) is available at the download page!
The Arduino IDE 1.6.3 is a bug fix release: after having released 1.6.2 with new libraries and cores managers, we received lots of useful feedback and fixed a handful of bugs.

In particular:

• Fixed some impolite crashes on some Linux distributions
• Bundled AVR core files are back into hardware folder
• Fixed “https” links not working on Windows and Mac
• Added new Arduino Language color highlight
• Introduced a way to help old cores to work with newer IDEs without having to upgrade their code
• Advise of duplicate libraries after compiling. Thanks @PaulStoffregen

As usual, the complete list of fixes and credits is available here.

Don’t forget to check out the Library Manager: at the time of writing, 144 libraries are listed, thanks to the contributions of Paul Stoffregen and Adafruit.

Just a quick note on the Arduino Language color coding, we assigned different colors to the three Language categories listed in the Arduino Reference. Structure keywords are green, variables are teal, while functions stays orange. We did a lot of user testing on these new color highlights, and it is helpful for beginners to have a bit more of a visual cue when starting to write code.

Don’t forget to report any issue you find, either on Github or on the Arduino forum: your help is very much appreciated. It doesn’t matter if you are not a tech specialist: every feedback adds value.

Happy hacking!

A new version of the Arduino IDE (1.6.2) is available at the download page!

The Arduino IDE 1.6.2 features new one click install of boards and libraries.

With 1.6.2, two new menu items are available: “Sketch > Include Library > Manage Libraries…” and “Tools > Board > Boards Manager…”

We have written two guides that explain how to use them. Discover how to use the Library Manager and how to install support for additional boards.

If you don’t find your preferred library in the list, let us know: open an issue on github and request us to add the library you love!

Having such tools allow us to better and easier deliver updates for both cores and libraries: just open Library Manager or Boards Manager to find an Update button on the updatable items.

IDE 1.6.2 also includes a handful of bug fixes and improvements, also thanks to our fantastic community of hackers and makers:

• Ever suffered of a super slow Tools menu? Solved! Ports list gets refreshed in background, so you won’t need to wait any more.
• We have dropped support for Mac OS X 10.6 or older: previous versions of the IDE will remain available for download at the previous releases page.
• A new EEPROM library, thanks to @Chris–A
• Pre and post build hooks, thanks to @Wackerbarth
• Various bug fixes, thanks to @Timmmm, @vicatcu, @arve0 and @Xuth

As usual, the complete list of fixes and credits is available here.

Don’t forget to report any issue you find, either on Github or on the Arduino forum: your help is very much appreciated. It doesn’t matter if you are not a tech specialist: every feedback adds value.

Session of work on 1.6.3 will start on Monday: we are now enjoying  Arduino Day!

A new version of the Arduino IDE (1.6.1) is available at the download page!
A month ago we released the version 1.6.0 of the Arduino IDE. We then received lots of feedback: issues on Github, emails on the developers mailing list and, most important, forum messages. We fixed a lot of issues, here is a brief list:

• Better Yún discovery mechanism (thanks Ron Guest)
• Better SoftwareSerial library (thanks Matthijs Kooijman)
• Native dialogs on MacOSX on the Java 7+ experimental version
• Improved library name matching, so IRemote library won’t conflict with RobotIRremote library (thanks Paul Stoffregen)
• Fixed bug on Windows when attempting to open a sketch by double clicking it

As usual, the complete list of fixes and credits is available here.

Don’t forget to report any issue you find, either on Github or on the Arduino forum: your help is very much appreciated. It doesn’t matter if you are not a tech specialist: every feedback adds value.

We are already working on release 1.6.2, with some very useful features and user experience improvements. Stay tuned!

Read more on MAKE

After almost two years “in the making” we’re thrilled to announce the availability of the Arduino IDE 1.6.0. The latest version of the development environment used by millions of people across the globe brings about a lot of improvements.

Since the day we started developing the first 1.5 version we have received a lot of feedback, suggestions and contributions from our vibrant community and we would like to thank you all for your passion and good will: thank you everyone, you rock!

We are glad to say that 1.6.0 includes a lot of new features. Here is a not so brief list of them:

• Support for multiple platforms
• Boards are detected and listed on “ports list” menu together with the serial port
• Drivers and IDE are now signed for Windows and MacOSX
• Improved speed of build process
• Autosave when compiling/uploading sketch
• A lot of improvements of the serial monitor (faster, backed by modern JSSC serial library instead of old RXTX)
• Find/replace over multiple tabs
• Improved lots of Arduino API libraries (String, Serial, Print, etc.)
• Tools & toolchains upgrades (avr-gcc, arm-gcc, avrdude, bossac)
• Command line interface
• IDE reports both sketch size and static RAM usage
• Editor shows line numbers
• Scrollable menus when many entries are listed
• Upload via network (Yún)
• HardwareSerial has been improved
• USB has got some stability and performance improvements
• SPI library now supports “transactions” for better interoperability when using multiple SPI devices at the same time
• Better support to 3rd party hardware vendors with configuration files (platform.txt and boards.txt)
• Submenus with board configuration can now be defined
• Fix for upload problems on Leonardo, Micro and Yún.
• Libraries bundled with Arduino have been improved and bugfixed, in particular: Bridge, TFT, Ethernet, Robot_Control, SoftwareSerial, GSM
• A lot of minor bugs of the user interface have been fixed

There is still lots of room for improvement, of course. Don’t forget to report any issue you find, either on Github or on the Arduino forum: your help is very much appreciated. It doesn’t matter if you are not a tech specialist: every feedback adds value.

We are already working on release 1.6.1, with some very cool features we will announce in the coming weeks.

The IDE is available from the newly redesigned Download page.

30 Arduino TRE Developer Edition boards (the last ones!) are available online today on our store. Whoever purchases them will be added to our Beta-testing Program, joining the about hundred betatesters already contributing to the development of the hardware and software of the board. You can learn about the program and the board on this post.

These boards have the latest Web IDE pre-installed and ready to go, we are now at a stable IDE release with everything fully functional. We will write a specific post about the new Web IDE next week, so stay tuned!

The first round of the program focused mostly on hardware and software testing, and we have just rewarded the betatesters who contributed the most. We really would like this second round to revolve around contents creation. For all Arduino boards, examples and projects are really crucial to get beginners started with a new environment. This is even more relevant for the Arduino TRE, that thanks to the onboard Linux system, has so much more power and potential than classic Arduinos.

For instance you could use the Arduino TRE as a personal cloud, keeping all your data available to your connected devices without having to rely on third party services; you could create a system to stream music wirelessly to your speakers with a tangible user interface; build a DIGI software that allows ZigBee porting; make an interactive whiteboard for schools, and so on.

We have a reward system in place for completed projects: two coupons of the same value of the Arduino TRE Developer Edition purchased, a dedicated post on our blog, Arduino TRE limited edition T-shirts, 10% off coupons for the Arduino Store. We look forward to hear about your projects!

When is the Arduino TRE going to be finally on the market? The board is ready, but we don’t have a final release date yet because we are still figuring out some manufacturing matters. We’ll keep you posted!

Image above
Arduino TRE Photobooth, Xun Yung and Tien Pham, Maker Faire Rome 2014.
A 3D anaglyph photobooth uses two cameras to capture a 3D picture. Each picture is processed using the Arduino TRE board. It separates the red channel from one camera and the cyan channel from the other, and overlays them together. The result is then printed out on a large photostrip.