

Cuwire – Better microcontroller IDE - zdw
http://apla.github.io/cuwire/

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andyjohnson0
As far as I can tell this targets only Arduino microcontrollers. Is this
correct? Anyone like to comment on how it compares to other Arduino IDEs?

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snops
> As far as I can tell this targets only Arduino micro controllers.

This appears to be the case[1], in fact it currently needs the Arduino IDE to
be installed as well to work, though it appears they plan to expand to a wide
range of platforms in future.

> Anyone like to comment on how it compares to other Arduino IDEs?

The official Arduino IDE is pretty terrible IMO, lacking autocomplete, a tree
view, code folding etc. It does however make things very simple for beginners,
with a big "upload" button making your code run immediately, and has the
basics like syntax highlighting.

There are a few other Arduino IDEs available[2], as well as command line tools
like ino[3] to compile Arduino sketches without needing the IDE, and there are
plugins available for Visual Studio, Eclipse, Sublime Text etc, so you can use
a much nicer text editor if you need to.

The articles IDE adds in symbol navigation (no autocomplete yet, listed as
todo), and shows you a nice visual pie chart of how much flash/ram you have
used. It also has a few other neat features like auto setting the serial baud
rate[4]. It uses brackets.io[5] as its text editor, so presumably has all the
text editing features that has too.

The main problem with the Arduino IDE is the lack of any debugging support
that isn't serial output. No single step, no memory view, no breakpoints. This
is fundamentally a problem with the hardware, as to keep the cost low the
Arduino was designed to use a serial bootloader rather than a separate
microcontroller to act as a debug interface. When dealing with intermittent
hardware bugs, this can be very painful indeed. You can splash out on an
external debug adaptor and debug your sketch with Eclipse[6], though this
certainly isn't as beginner friendly. Similar priced boards like TI's MSP430
Launchpad, or Freescale's FRDM boards now come with debug hardware built in,
but they are a lot less beginner friendly.

[1]
[http://apla.github.io/cuwire/cli/Platforms/](http://apla.github.io/cuwire/cli/Platforms/)
[2]
[http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/DevelopmentTools](http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/DevelopmentTools)
[3] [http://inotool.org](http://inotool.org) [4]
[http://apla.github.io/cuwire/gui/FeaturesSerialMon/](http://apla.github.io/cuwire/gui/FeaturesSerialMon/)
[5] [http://brackets.io](http://brackets.io) [6]
[http://awtfy.com/2012/03/29/hardware-debugging-the-
arduino-u...](http://awtfy.com/2012/03/29/hardware-debugging-the-arduino-
using-eclipse-and-the-avr-dragon/)

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neuromancer2701
It will be interesting to see what the end product of the Arduino Zero will
be. To my knowledge they are taking SAM D21 Xplained Pro with the built-in
debugger and making it into a Arduino Uno form factor. But it has been
announce for quite awhile and no release date is in sight. I would think the
hardware development time would be shorter but if they want a decent
development environment it could take time to polish that.

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snarfy
What do I set the arduino folder to under linux? /usr/share/arduino?

~~~
apla
/usr/share/arduino must be detected automatically. If you have issues, please
check arduino version. cuwire is working with arduino 1.5.8 or later
(including 1.6.x). but most of the linux distribution include only 1.0.x.

