- [Instructor] Did you know
that the Arduino company provides for free three different tools for programming your Arduino board? They're called Integrated
Development Environments or IDEs. If you're trying to figure
out which one you should use, then check out this episode. We're gonna talk about
the Arduino Web Editor, the original Arduino IDE
and the new Arduino IDE 2.0. By the end of this lesson, you'll have an idea of which
one's gonna be the best fit for what you need to do. Stay tuned. (uplifting music) Subscribe to our YouTube channel to get more videos like this. Before we start, just a big shout out to Altium
for sponsoring this video. Huge thanks. You can check the description to get a free trial of
the Altium software. You know, when you're
just getting into Arduino, there's a lot to learn. Because you know, there's hardware and
there's also software. The software that you
need to program in Arduino or an Arduino-compatible board is all free provided by Arduino. It's all open source software. And to get that software, you just go to the Arduino website and you click on the software tab. And when you're here, you're kind of greeted by a
bunch of different options. And it might be like, "Hey, which one am I supposed to get? Just tell me, you know." So we're gonna talk
about all three options. Again, there's a Web Editor, there is the original Arduino IDE, and then there is a newer
version of the Arduino IDE. So let's go ahead and start talking about the original Arduino IDE version. It's simple to download, you just pick your operating
system on the right-hand side, it'll start a download. You go through the installation
steps and it'll open up. These are the most current
stable versions, right here. Now, if you wanted to
get a previous version, you can click here and you can get a bunch
of the previous versions, or if you wanna get the
absolute hot off the press, newest version of this IDE,
then you can download it here. Now they're still maintaining
the original Arduino IDE. So this is gonna be the
most recent updated features and bug fixes of the original Arduino IDE. So the original Arduino
IDE looks like this. Right here, it looks like
a kind of a text editor. Now, if you've been into
software development for awhile, this might look a little
rinky-dink to you. There's really not a lot going on. Like, there's not buttons everywhere to have like 10 million preferences and, there's really not
much like code highlighting or anything like that. There's no auto-complete. There's not a lot of anything. It's like very much just a
trimmed down text editor. You know, you just put
in your code and run it. You know, like one, two, three, four, there's like five buttons up here. So it's just a really simple editor. And it hasn't changed much,
like the appearance of it hasn't changed much in a long time. And that is one of its
biggest features, I think. That it's super simple. And I think that's one of
its best features actually, is that it is super simple. Especially if you're new to programming, sometimes trying to figure
out what an IDE can do and how it works, can
get really confusing. There's just a lot of different options and some of those options get in the way of you kind of learning just
the basic programming stuff that you're trying to learn. The Arduino IDE really
just stays out of your way. Finding stuff is super simple because there's just not a ton of menus. You know, you like, select the board you're gonna work on, you select the port that
you're gonna have it on and you verify it and you upload it and that's pretty much it. So the original Arduino
IDE, it's bare bones, it does what you need it to, it's very much like just
a straight-up text editor. And I think they're gonna
keep this for the long run. Like, I don't see them
ever deprecating this IDE, I could be completely wrong, but I foresee since this
IDE is so beginner-friendly, I don't see them dropping it, or that is, I don't see the Arduino
company just dropping and not maintaining this
open source project, but I could be wrong. All right, so that's your
original Arduino IDE. What about the Web Editor? What is that all about? Well, the Web Editor,
hey, you can code online. Everything's, you know, the
cloud's eaten everything, right? So to do that, you know, you just click Getting Started and you can set up an account. They're gonna ask you
to set up an account, but once you've set up an
account, you can just sign in. Now you don't have to set
up double authentication, but I really like to do that. Once you've signed in, then you just go to the Web Editor. And this opens up an IDE
within your web browser. And it's pretty similar to this IDE. It's not too much different. You can create folders, manage libraries, set preferences. It's got a neat feature where
you can share your sketches so you can get a link or you
can embed them on a webpage if you wanted, that can be handy. You can select which boards you want, program your board from the IDE. So, I mean, it's same kind of stuff. Now, there are some cool
features in the Web IDE that you will not find on the basic IDE and one of those is the collapse. You can collapse code for example. So if you've got a bunch of
codes, you can collapse it. That can be kind of handy. I like that. But I would say for all
intents and purposes, it's kind of like the basic IDE, except it's in your browser. Now that can have some
really nice features. Let's say, for example, you work on a bunch of
different computers. Then you can just log
into whatever computer, go to the Web IDE and bam, you've got access to the IDE. That's pretty nice. So you can get your sketches
wherever you happen to be. So that's pretty darn handy. I like that. Another advantage of having the Web IDE is that if you happen
to have a Chromebook, then Chromebooks, you can't download like the IDEs to a Chromebook. For example, you can't download the older version of the Arduino IDE or the newer version of the Arduino IDE to the Chrome operating system, but you can open it up the Web Editor and program your boards
using the Arduino editor. So the web editor, it's handy if you jump
around different computers, still keeps it pretty
simple, straightforward, and it's free to use. There might be a limit
on the number of sketches you can have on the cloud. I'm not too sure about that. I don't think though, I
don't believe so though, I think it's pretty much an open plan. Now, if you wanna start
like running IOT devices and having the Arduino cloud manage it, then you can upgrade your plan. They've got like a whole
service for the IOT cloud thing, but that's not so much about the IDE. Alright, so that is the cloud editor. Do you need a printed
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in the description. So what about this new future
version of the Arduino IDE, or Arduino IDE 2. Man, bright and shiny and cool. So installation is the exact same. You just select which operating system you wanna download on. It'll download a file. You know, you install it,
it's really straightforward. Now, you can have both
Arduino IDEs on your computer at the same time. They don't interfere with each other. For example, I've got the original Arduino IDE here and I've got the new Arduino IDE 2 here. You can have them installed. Same machine. Doesn't make a difference. Now, one thing I do wanna
know, before I forget, if you do decide to use
the new Arduino IDE, make sure to like set up a community count in the Arduino forum, because they have a
forum set up specifically for the Arduino IDE, and
they're really active on there. The team that is developing this, they're active on there and they're trying to get
as much feedback as possible to make it a really nice version. But you can get on the
community, leave some comments, you know, and say, hey, maybe I was, maybe you're trying this and
you had an issue or whatever, but it would definitely help
them make this product better. All right, so what does
the new IDE look like? Well, let's check it out. Ooh, well, that looks kind of cool. All right, the Arduino IDE
is opening up over here. It's actually opening
up with another example. So, hey, let's see here. This don't look too different now. I've got my, I always like to make my font really big because, I don't like to stare at little fonts. So, that's why. But oh, what's cool, you can select a theme right in here. We could go with the dark
theme and it'll refresh and now I've got a cool dark theme. Now that, hey, doesn't that look cool? That looks like, you know,
more modern, whatever. So, what do you get with
this new modern IDE? Well, you get some more
features, so let's, it's got like auto-complete
right, so, serial dot- Oh, hey, look at that. All the different serial
functions that I could use, right there. Now you're not going to get that on the original Arduino IDE. Now you might be wondering like, wait, why would a dot
bring up a contextual menu? Like what, and what's all, what are all of these things right here? This just has to do with
like jumping into a library and grabbing some of the
functions out of that library. And if you want to learn more
about that kind of thing, you can check out our website,
programmingelectronics.com. We've got some training. You can check it out, and just learn about all this
kind of programming stuff with Arduino. All right, anyways. So you can like, you
know, auto-complete stuff, that's pretty sweet. You can go into the definition
of different functions and like, look where, you know, look behind the scenes and
the functions being written. They've got a debugger on here, and now the debugger is only
gonna work for certain boards. And from my understanding, there's not a ton of boards supported, but that might be old information. But, so you can like step
through the code with its bugger. So that would be something you'd expect on a more full featured IDE. That's not something that
the original Arduino IDE has. So yeah, I mean, it's like the new and
improved Arduino IDE, still looks relatively simple, but it's got some more features in here that I hope are gonna
still be user-friendly. I will say, in the end, it doesn't really matter
which Arduino IDE you use. It doesn't matter if you use the original, it doesn't matter if you use the new one. It doesn't matter if
you use the Web Editor, because Arduino code is
gonna run the exact same in any of these editors. So, just because the editor change doesn't mean the language changes. The underlying language
remains the exact same. In fact, if we wanted, we could open up just
like a simple text editor. We could type out our code right in here. And as long as we could get it compiled and loaded on the Arduino
IDE, doesn't matter a bit. Now, one last thing to say, there's, so those are the
three Arduino made IDEs, community supported open source IDEs. You can also use Visual Studio
Code to program your Arduino. So, Visual Studio Code
is a really popular IDE made by Microsoft and
maintained by Microsoft. And it is a free version
of a more robust IDE, but there's an extension that you can get. It's maintained by Microsoft, just search for Arduino and extensions and you can install it. And then what this allows you to do is to write Arduino code
in Visual Studio Code, and you can upload it to your boards. You know, you can like select your board, upload it to your board. I have used it in the past. It's pretty neat. You know, I do quite a bit
of code in Visual Studio. So I'm really comfortable with the IDE and there's some cool
features that I like to use when I am programming with other people. So we can like share code. And I think that's like a lot of fun. But I have found it somewhat
buggy, I guess I will say. The installation, sometimes
when things change, the plugin doesn't seem
to update quite as fast. And so, something won't work,
like you're working fine, and then two days later,
it like kind of crashes. And that is not something
that ever happens with the Arduino IDE software you'll get from the Arduino website. Anyway, okay. There we go. So, you got a bunch of options, which ones should you go for? Well, let me tell you, if you're just getting
started programming, just download this puppy right here, the original Arduino IDE. It's not going out of
style, I'm telling you what. I really think it's gonna
stay around for a long time. It's a simple, easy to use IDE and it's great for
learning how to program. Well, I hope you found that helpful. If you want to learn more about all this Arduino programming stuff, make sure to check out
our training program at programmingelectronics.com. Also, thanks so much to Altium
for sponsoring this video. If you want to get a free trial of an amazing PCB design software, check out the description, use our link. You can get a free trial
of Altium Designer. Also, before you go, make sure
to subscribe to the channel, if you'd like to get
more videos like this. Leave a comment if you have any questions or
thoughts about this video. And as always, have a great day. Thanks so much, bye. (chime tones)
