If you're like me, you might still be running an old version of the Arduino IDE on your machine. I actually haven't updated since 1.0. So - shame on me. But today, Arduino released their latest-greatest development environment - 1.6!
Here is a laundry list of improvements that are part of this new release (shamelessly taken from the Arduino blog):
- 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, etc.)
- 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
So if you're looking to update your Arduno IDE, now is a great time. Head over to Arduino.cc to grab 1.6!
"The latest greatest IDE is now available for download." As in the highest IDE number Arduino has put out? The bestest ever IDE Arduino has put out? Or did you mean the best IDE out there? That last one I would not agree with at all. :)
1 I'm excited about
2 line numbers,
3 you guys!
FYI version 1.0.6 had line numbers, at least the mac version did. I don't know about versions prior to that though...
So, how does one add the Sparkfun boards to the new version? There were different methods to add them in 1.5 vs. 1.0 flavors and now it's supposed to be "easier" - except details are lacking (so far).
OK, I dug around some more and and found an obscure reference to a github page - apparently you just unzip the contents into the hardware directory - the same as you do for the 1.5 versions.
For anyone else looking, the GitHub page is here. Basic instructions for installation are in the README. We're working on updating all of our tutorials currently!
All I want is normal tab behaviour
It looks like they wrapped the Yun stuff into the common distribution. That's great! Thanks for the heads-up!