Arduino Without The IDE

Some of you may remember that I've previously blogged about shrinking down an Arduino by buying the ATmega328P-PU and associated components. This is a great way of using the Arduino in a more permanent setting as it is much cheaper than using a full Arduino. I did, however, have a problem in that the Arduino IDE seemed to use the wrong upload speed when trying to burn the bootloader or upload a sketch. This meant I had to mess around copying the command out of the IDE and into a terminal and then tweaking it so that it used the right upload speed. Honestly while the IDE is easy to use (especially for novices) it isn't really a very good IDE and suffers from a number of problems which really annoy me. So I set out to look for an alternative way of compiling and uploading code to the Arduino.

Given that I already knew that the Arduino IDE is just a front-end to a number of other tools which are responsible for the compiling and uploading (which is why I could copy the relevant commands into a terminal and tweak them) I knew that it was likely someone else had already figured out how to use the Arduino without the IDE. In fact a couple of people have published details on how to do this, but the most comprehensive approach I found was by Tim Marston.

Tim's arduino-mk project supports compiling Arduino code, uploading it to an Arduino, and has a serial monitor as well. As the project name suggests this is all implemented as a classic Makefile meaning that it works from the command line, leaving me free to choose whichever code editor I want to use. The really impressive part though was that it worked first time; not only to upload code to my Arduino, but also to upload code to my hand-built replacement. There were, however, a few missing features.

Firstly the build process didn't pull in any libraries in the users sketchbook folder (which the IDE does), meaning some code I had didn't initially compile. Secondly the project didn't have any support for burning the bootloaders to new chips, something the IDE should be able to do, although in my experience it doesn't work properly (the same upload speed problem). Fortunately arduino-mk is an open-source project and Tim is more than happy to accept patches for bug fixes or new features. Whilst I don't think I've ever written a Makefile from scratch before, I know enough about how they work to add to an existing file and so with a little effort I managed to figure out adding support for both libraries in the sketchbook folder and the burning of bootloaders. Both features have now been incorporated into the latest release which means everyone else now has access to them as well.

If you are happy working from the command line and aren't really a fan of the Arduino IDE then I would definitely recommend trying out arduino-mk.