Arduino IDE 2.0 Beta 7
Les Pounder gently pushes away a slice of Pi and looks for something a little fresher among the serving plates of his maker buffet.
Les Pounder looks for something a little fresher among his maker buffet.
The Arduino IDE has remained largely the same for close to a decade. It works, but at times it can feel a little long in the tooth. The Arduino IDE 2.0 beta sees a radical redesign, but with familiar elements remaining. It also remains compatible with existing microcontroller boards and libraries. There’s a clearer UI with an area to write code dominating the screen and just underneath is the familiar output window, which tells us the progress of flashing our code. But a tab, Serial Monitor, in that area enables us to use the serial monitor throughput without navigating via the clunky menus.
Easy access
To the left of the screen are four icons. The spyglass enables us to search through a project for keywords – useful for larger projects. The debug icon is used to find faults in projects, and we can create configurations in JSON that can be tuned to our project. The next icon is the Boards Manager. This is nothing new for 2.0 – it’s been part of the IDE for quite some time – but the inclusion on this panel makes it easy to search and install new boards, including the RP2040, which is also available in IDE 1.8. Equally the last icon, Library Manager is nothing new but again it’s nice to have easier access to.
On the top row, just underneath the menus is the familiar row of buttons to verify, flash, create a new file and open or save a project. Just next to these is a new drop-down menu that has the currently selected board highlighted. It shows a red cross if the board isn’t connected. Should we want to add a new board, we can click “Select Other Board & Port” and then search for boards in our collection, and assign them to a port.
Using the Arduino IDE 2.0 is much the same as before, but with the UI refinements it feels fresher and more userfriendly. We tested with a Raspberry Pi Pico and the latest official MBED OS firmware for the board. Everything went smoothly and we had a flashing LED in just a few moments. We also tested a simple script to print messages to the serial monitor, and here’s where we hit a snag. More often than not we were unable to connect to the device, be it a Raspberry Pi Pico or Arduino’s own Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect. We received an Error opening serial port ‘/dev/ttyACM0’. (Port busy) error despite no other windows or applications claiming the port. After searching online we found the resolution was to purge ModemManager, but before trying this make sure you don’t need it for another application.
Is the Arduino IDE 2.0 worth the upgrade? Right now, if you’re comfortable or rely on the 1.8 series IDE for work then it’s best to stick with that, but we encourage you to try it out. After all, the IDE is free, it doesn’t interfere with existing installs and you can help beta-test the IDE for future users. The new UI is fresh and very easy to use, and is ideal for newcomers. If you’re running typical Arduino boards (not RP2040-based), then the IDE 2.0 is stable and a joy to use.