
Codebender: An online Arduino IDE - Garbage
http://codebender.cc/
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marssaxman
What is the point? I don't understand why anyone would want to use this. The
Arduino IDE is limited enough already - why make it worse by embedding it in a
web page?

"improves compilation time" - but compilation time is nothing, it's flashing
the microcontroller that takes the time, and there's nothing a "cloud" system
can do to improve that.

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tzikis
marssaxman i'd be very sincerely grateful if you'd like pre-register and test
it. the thing that got us started in the first place was the limitations of
the Arduino IDE, and we think we did a great job with that. we really do have
a much better editor, as hackaday elegantly put it, "codebender uses clang a
wonderful compiler that will give you extremely descriptive warnings on
terrible code." plus a better way to manage your sketches (instead of relying
in a directory with 100s of projects).

anyway, in regards to your question, if you've ever used a big project (20-30k
when compiled), it can take quite a while to compile and less time flashing.
plus, the Arduino IDE compiles it every_single_time although there is no need
to, so if, for example, you want to flash this code to a nub you're spending
more than half of your time recompiling the same code for no particular reason

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pierrebouchet
I agree with you on the Arduino IDE limitations, but what I don't get is all
the browser/cloud-based part. The mbed platform has all that online stuff, and
that's precisely why it's a pain to use.

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tzikis
simonbarker87 makes a great case for us on the comments below. i'd just like
to add that it generally skips the (sometimes painful) process of installing
and updating the hardware. everyone who has taught a workshop or class on
Arduino and had to help about 10 people get set up probably knows what i'm
talking about.

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gklitt
I've never had a problem with the standard Arduino IDE, including libraries,
or compilation times. And I suppose the remote flashing might be useful in
some circumstances, but for any actual development I want to be in the same
room as the board with an oscilloscope/logic analyzer. So I'm pretty unclear
on what pain point this is trying to solve.

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acgourley
Some autocomplete and better error/warning highlighting would surely save
people time. I'm not defending codebender, which I've never tried, but the
arduino IDE is just barely good enough.

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exDM69
As a hacker, I got very quickly frustrated with the Arduino IDE and I wanted
to use what I always use: vim and :make. I found that the new "ino" commmand
line tool (<http://inotool.org/>) was the easiest to set up. I added arduino
syntax highlighting and a few helpful keybindings for a comfortable hacking
experience.

Question to Codebender authors: how did you get access to the serial port from
the browser?

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tzikis
It wasn't that hard, really. Originally we wanted to use Firefox's and
Chrome's native javascript APIs, but they aren't stable yet, we had to do
double the work and even then we could only target two of the major browsers.
So what we do is run a Java Applet which communicates with our Javascript and
gives us access to the serial ports.

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simonbarker87
I've never used Arduino but have done a lot of work with mbed and their
compiler is browser/cloud based so this is a great for Arduino.

One of the benefits of something like this is that it is not tied to one
platform and, more importantly, it can be used in schools, universities and
other institutions with archaic IT policies where installing software is a
trial.

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nnnnni
Let me know when they make something that automatically builds circuits...
THEN I will be interested.

This is just "LOOK! WE PUT ___ INTO THE CLOUD!"

