#211 Like Arnie, I'm back! 😃 Arduino IDE 2.0 (Beta)

and welcome back yes it's been a while but i'm back and i'm going to talk to you amongst other things about the new arduino pro ide even though they seem to have dropped the the pro moniker on that screenshot you see there but they have now got it to beta stage which means it's pretty much usable maybe not for system critical code but then again us hobbyists don't really have system critical stuff do we so i would say we need to explore this now i know i've looked at it in the past a little bit and it was a little bit flaky but it was it promised good things and it's built of course on eclipse thea which is a well-known platform to build these sort of ides on so yeah we'll have a look at that we'll also talk about um no no we're not talking about my workshop i'll do a separate video about that all together we will talk about my esp32 web radio because the bbc in their infinite wisdom decided that on march the 21st they would stop transmitting on all the known urls that people have been using for donkeys years and have totally destroyed people's listening pleasure especially those from abroad but i think we might have cracked it between us and uh yeah well put it this way i've got radio 2 and radio 4 on my esp32 web radio now and that works absolutely fine no chirps burbles or anything and yes they do send out metadata as well so it's at least two things and i'm sure there's going to be lots of other things that occur to me as we go forward now you might hear a little bit of noise out there for example there's a plane going overhead at this very second because i've got my door open the windows open because i've been painting this morning yeah i've painted the gates two gates i'll go out there painting my window frame so i can't shut those because yeah things are still in a state of flux let's say but it's becoming more stable so without further ado let's look at this arduino ide 2.0.0 beta 5 and see what it can do now it says here beta 5 then in brackets a little bit further down it says four weeks ago well i downloaded this i don't know three or four days ago so i'm guessing there isn't one there now but who knows the time you see this video they could be a slightly improved version and if there is for goodness sake take it because after all this is beta software okay let's um let's flash an led or something shall we now quick shout out to my sponsor jlcpcb now as from tomorrow so the time you see this video they're doing a collaboration with easy eda as you know it's my preferred pcb cad program it's simple but powerful it's intuitive to use let's just have a quick look at a design i made recently so here's a fairly recent design of mine my esp32 web radio designed it in easy eda because i had all the features that i needed and don't forget the teardrop feature that allows the tracks to be slightly bigger at the ends where they join pins and things to give them a bit more stability and then you just click the gerber button at the top here so that one there and it will say great let's do a drc check which you'd always do but for the purposes of this video let's just skip that and it says great you can either generate your gerber files directly or all of them at jlcpcb and if you click that it will go straight to the jlcpcb site upload the gerber files as it's generating them in the background automatically and show you what you can do there so let's have another look at that so this is jlc pcb's website it's two dollars for one to four layers pcbs pretty good value for five of those and you can go right up to 100 millimeters by 100 millimeters you've seen all this before in my other videos the quality is great so head over onto jlcpcb or easy eda site the links are down below and see what you come up with tomorrow well worth a visit believe me and let's not forget they got a facebook group here it is and as you can see they're joining forces here a bit more transparently so we understand that the two are connected easy eda to design your pcb and jlc pcp to actually manufacture it sounds good to me and if you join the group there's all sorts of good things on the way so have a look at that as well jlc pcb go and have a look right the first thing to do if you want to find it is to head over to the arduino forum or blog i should say what i did is type in the arduino ide beta as you can see here on the screen and the very first entry is the one that we need there is also an awful lot of help regarding this ide obviously arduino want it to be a success and they realize that it can be a bit daunting for well both beginners and experienced people so there's a lot of help as well but anyway if we just go to this one here so we can download it and we'll see what happens next okay this is the landing page and there's an awful lot of information on here but buried amongst all this uh good stuff that you really ought to read there's a download it now if i can uh just whiz to that right just around the bottom of the article and then try it now bit you can see it says download now that one there now unlike the um the alpha versions which you may have tried out the alpha version was just i think they were zipped but anyway the point is you took the whole zip put it into a folder then ran it directly this one is back to how most windows programs i don't know what it's like on mac and linux but you you can install it properly right so you install it and it does whatever it does behind the scenes and it then just puts an icon on your desktop and you're away okay now the point about this ide that arduino is making great pains to promote and make sure you understand what it's about is that beginners like they're handheld and nothing too complicated i can remember way back when i was starting off in microcontrollers or even you know the internet i started off the internet with aol america online if you can remember that but it was simple and easy and didn't frighten me and that's what beginners want so what arduino have done is made this almost as two versions it's the same code the same interface but there's a beginner and an advanced version of it all built in together and the beginner version will look very very similar to the old arduino ide that we've come to hate and use for for everything except of course you have all the goodies behind the scenes working for you to help you with things that we'll have a look at in a minute when you've outgrown all that though and you think i want a bit more now i might want to be in control you just click the advanced tab and well your world's your oyster so to speak okay so it's a it's a pathway you sold off um at the beginner level and then ramp up when you're ready to the advanced level okay let's have a look at it in action and flash that led okay so i've fired it up and it looks here as you can see pretty much like the old one always used to okay you do have to select the board as you would have done although i think the previous version was perhaps easier to select the board here you have a drop down list and you can select another board and a port i've already selected the arduino uno so if i select that one you get all these boards and there's there are literally thousands of boards you can select these days because arduino recognized that everybody uses the arduino ide for every board there is right except those of us using platform i o and other other platforms like that but that's that's a different matter so there are literally hundreds and thousands of boards on here and i've selected the arduino uno because that's what i've got a clone of on my desktop okay now i don't know why there's this little exclamation mark here about the fact i've selected com4 because it does say down here if you notice oh i'm in the way but right then in the bottom corner let me just um bring that up a bit so we can see it there we are it says down here arduino uno on com4 so why it's giving me an exclamation mark there i don't know maybe it's because i haven't actually uploaded any code to it yeah i've just literally plugged in the usb cable and that's it now whilst i'm just going to quickly write four or five lines of code on here which is the sketch that everybody uses first time the blink sketch you could probably get this from the examples actually now the the great thing about any modern ide including this one now is that you have auto completion and auto suggestion and things like that what does that mean well if we go on here and say the first thing we want to say is the led on pin 13 is an output pin right so we can flash it okay so we start typing uh pin for example so p i squiggle squiggle look underneath straight away like not quite sure what you mean yet pin now if you were to wait long enough it would probably pop up something but if you press control and space that's the give me some help please i'll press ctrl space and it says right everything i can find to do with pin is now listed and as you can see the very first thing it lists is a function pin mode and then it tells you what the parameters are expect so it goes which is the pin it's a u in 8 so it's an 8 bit integer type for pin and an 8-bit integer type for the mode input output so you go ah yes that's what i needed to do it's called pin mode silly me for forgetting that so hit that you go right what do you want your pin to be well i'm going to break all my own rules and put in some magic numbers even though i shouldn't do and say well it's pin 13. not a good thing to do that but there we are and then hit tab and we go to the next one and what do we want it to be what we want it to be out now it should also prompt us to say out put shouldn't it so control space and the very first thing that pops up again is output brilliant see you can see now even that one line is going to make a typing errors almost well unheard of it won't let you type something in that silly because you'll get a squiggle you know it won't compile and similarly you can just type a few characters get the thing you want by pressing control and space bar simultaneously and they think that's the one the blue line that you can see there is the one that's currently selected and just hit enter and it auto completes now is that not a huge step up from the effectively notepad type experience that we had on the old arduino ide yes it is i hear you cry indeed okay uh semicolon if we didn't put semicolons and things like that it'll also tell you that things are wrong basically it's going to a make your coding a lot quicker because you think i know i need to use this function i can't quite remember what it's called and i certainly can't remember the order of the the parameters that it takes this will do all that for you and and even better is of course under the old system the old arduino ide you could write all your stuffing that's it's great no mistakes there i wish you hit compile and it comes up with a thousand errors because the no the third line in has got some kind of syntactical error there and everything after that it can't quite work out what you mean because that you never terminated the previous statement with a semicolon or something yes and that's very frustrating because all these areas coming past you think stops up stop i know what was wrong i forgot something right up there that won't happen anymore because you'll see that there's an error straight away because it's going to tell you all right right okay let's uh whiz through and type a few more things so i haven't done the pin mode we want to um well let's set it to low although when you're switching on an arduino the pins are set low anyway i tend to sort of do it just in case really i think everybody does so did you did you did you digit what did you oh digital right how did it know that it's amazing isn't it select that which pin well once again it's pin no not 12 13 tab and we want low thank you very much time again to the end and semicolon brilliant i mean this is this is going so well and as you can see it's all nicely color coded so in the loop all we need to do is have a simple on off type statement so what we're going to do here is to say digital right and we're going to have pin 13 tab hi tab semicolon we'll have a little delay even though nobody uses delays anymore let's say 500 seconds tab wrong key i'm trying to do this through the camera so it's a little bit difficult semicolon and so digital right and we're going to have it on pin 13 and we're going to have it low and then we're going to have a another little delay let me just let me just finish this off all right okay that's that's the simple blink sketch incidentally i tend to put a double blink sketch together when i'm testing new boards out things just to make sure that um it's not something else that was pre-programmed as part of the bootloader upload you know when you've got the board itself most manufacturers far east wherever they tend to upload the boot uh load of code and the sketch all at the same time that flashes the led just to prove that it's all working all well and good um but then if you write your own i want to test this board if you put a double blink in it so blink blink delay blink blink delay then you know that you've actually uploaded your code and you don't ever get into that situation where you think you've uploaded the code in fact it's failed but because the led is blinking you think oh it's worked been there done that okay right what do we do now then well for a start i haven't saved this yet because as you see at the top there it's saying sketch may 13 a hmm obviously not saved so let's save this and then we can compile it and oh there's another noise in my workshop and move on so what i've basically done here is just to click the verify button up there it's compiled the code and said there it is now if you notice there's not a lot of information there because i obviously haven't set the compilation mode to verbose which tells you awful lot what's going on as part of the compilation process this is once again this sort of beginner mode where it's not trying to scare you by giving you lots of messages that you couldn't possibly understand as a beginner but i do recommend that you go to file settings and change the compilation level to verbose the help pages on the arduino cc blog that we saw has all this in in easy to understand language and is well worth following anyway we've compiled now we need to upload that to the arduino on my workbench which is still waiting here there it is with my keyboard so it's just waiting for something to happen and nothing is flashing there there's a red led on there that's the power led and that's it so let's go back to the code window right all we're going to do here then is that click the upload this will be interesting to see what happens right is it going to find com4 oh yeah no upload port really right failed unknown no upload port provided which means it doesn't know which port we've selected here let's just double check that shall we select on the board and port go to here we selected the uno we also selected com4 do you remember we did that bit okay but i'm gonna have to shrink this window down a little bit if you see here it says arduino uno not connected down here down this bit here don't know why let's go to tools there's a drop down window that says which port do you want i say com4 and it says nothing okay let's try let's try uploading it again see if it's going to find it this time um interesting let me i'm just going to make sure i'm not doing something silly here and um get back to you on this one well all i've done is disconnect the arduino from that usb cable plug it back in again it goes oh you mean the arduino on com4 hmm oh well these things happen it is beta software anyway let's upload and see if that's going to work now gosh the uh yeah compilation oh done uploading it says right let's flip over to the main here it is is it flashing that led and as you can see that top led there is flashing away quite happily so there we are that's it's proof really not that you needed it particularly that the new arduino ide is good enough to compile and upload to your arduino you know even if you do have to sometimes disconnect the usb connection and reconnect it although i suspect in all honesty it's probably because i've been playing about here a little bit got itself confused the look and feel though of this particular ide looks very similar does it not to the standard rde so all beginners can use this straight away but get a massive boost in their understanding and productivity because of all those auto complete and also suggestion and pop-ups like this one here it tells you what the function is and the parameters expecting and what the what the general format of it is the declaration of it is all that is going to help tremendously so i can only recommend to go away and download it you can run it alongside the other arduinos ideas layers okay although i would recommend always backing up your old code just in case and start experimenting and clicking buttons really i mean these buttons over here for example we haven't even discussed great i'm going to leave it there because i want you to go away get the code download it install it on your pc whether that's mac linux or windows which is what i'm using here windows of course and just well yeah flashing the led first just to get a feel of it and see all the things like when you type stuff in and when you put a decimal point in and so if you say digital if you said pin mode dot something is it going to come up with lots of other different functions well spoiler alert yes it does okay so it's well worth experimenting with it and then you suddenly realize how useful a productivity ad is and right we'll leave this here and we've still got that exclamation mark then i don't know why because now we have uploaded and it has worked so i suspect these are just little minor little things that will eventually be taken out in future beta releases but it's working it's stable good stuff now i was going to talk to you about the bbc stations and my esp32 web radio because that's i've got a solution for that um but i've just been editing the video and already it's like coming up to 20 minutes and i've got a slow internet connection now because i live in the middle of nowhere basically country side fields and whatnot so i think we'll call a halt there as a first video after something like five months and we'll say you get on do download that ide though and we'll talk about the esp32 the bbc don't get me started and all that kind of stuff next video along with some other stuff and i'll also put together that video on my workshop so i know a lot of you interested in it even if it's not directly related to order well it is is related to arduino stuff isn't it i wouldn't have this workshop if i wasn't doing all this stuff so yeah it is all very much related okay cool we're going to leave it there put your comments down below if you've got anything to tell me if you think this arduino ide 2.0 beta is any good if you've tried it if you hit problems or not you know i'm talking about cosmetic stuff with those exclamation marks or whatever but if you've got any real issues then do put them down then we'll see if anybody else has had them and if indeed there's a new version coming out must be sort of a daily build going on somewhere mustn't there okay great okay great to see you all again and uh do keep uh subscribed and track what i'm doing and there'll be a new video on a fairly semi-regular basis i hope okay nice to see you see in the next video i hope you're finding these videos useful and interesting there are plenty more videos to choose and a couple are shown below and if you'd like to subscribe to this channel just click on my picture below and enjoy the rest of the videos thanks for watching you

Channel: Ralph S Bacon

Views: 10,748

Rating: 4.9260173 out of 5

Keywords: Arduino, Beginners, electronics, C++, microcontrollers, programming, gadgets, ardiuno

Id: Aoiu7nlEsY0

Length: 21min 32sec (1292 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021