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Overview of the changes coming in Arduino 1.0.

David MellisJuly 19th, 2010

Over the past few years, the Arduino software has come a long way, in both features and robustness. There are a lot of little things, however, that we never really thought about or that we’d like to change. Arduino 1.0 is our chance to clean up these details and establish a stable platform for the future.

There’s a detailed list of the changes planned or considered for Arduino 1.0 on our development site (hosted by Google Code). The main items include:

Environment:

  • New file extension to replace the .pde borrowed from Processing (issue #13).
  • Redesigned toolbar icons (issue #291).
  • Ability to upload sketches using an in-system programmer (ISP) from the IDE (issue #260).
  • Simplifying the process of selecting your board and serial port (issues #223 and #257).
  • Command-line compilation and uploading of sketches (issue #124).

Language (most of these are possibilities and still open for discussion):

  • Creating events that can be called automatically, e.g. the serialEvent() as in Processing (issue #263).
  • Adding specific functions for enabling / disabling the internal pullup resistors (issue #246).
  • Modifying the behavior of print() on bytes (issue #284).
  • Functions for accessing more of the low-level functionality of the hardware timers and other peripherals (issues #169 and #248).
  • Optimizing the digitalWrite() function (issue #140).

Of course, we’ll continue to make improvements and additions to the software after Arduino 1.0, but that by making the incompatible changes together, we’ll make the transition clearer and easier. Once you’ve adopted your code to Arduino 1.0, it should continue to work going forward.

If you have questions, comments or suggestions, feel free to respond here or to post on the individual items. Contributions are welcome; please sign up for the developers mailing list if you’re interested in working on the Arduino software.

Categories:Software

9 Responses to “Overview of the changes coming in Arduino 1.0.”

  1. Cort Buffington Says:

    I would VERY much like to see a way to store arrays and structures of constant values in flash memory. I realize there are some things out there, but it would be very, very handy if there was a clean, integrated way to do this.

  2. The Future of Arduino Says:

    […] after all these years. Well, no more. In September, it will finally be released in a 1.0 version. Here’s a post that describes the main changes, which are mostly just cleaning it up a bit. Main changes […]

  3. Ryan Says:

    So are you sticking to the AtMega328, or migrating to something bigger and better?

  4. Deane Rimerman Says:

    Arduino seems to be the leader in IoT geek buzz in the past month or so.

    I’m thinking about doing a post on leading Internet of Things software.

    Want to help add to the list: Arduino, Dash 7, Mote Runner, USNAP, Arryent, Pachube, who else?

    Please send additions to tips@readwriteweb.com

  5. piorekf Says:

    When can we expect Arduino 1.0?

  6. dcuartielles Says:

    Hej Ryan,

    thanks for your question. However, you should note that the blog post is about Arduino’s IDE and not about hardware. Dave Mellis wrote a summary of all the changes/improvements we are planning to introduce in the current IDE to make the experience of programming Arduino boards even easier.

  7. dcuartielles Says:

    Piorekf: as you see from the post, we are very cautious when it comes to announce dates for official releases. I can only tell you that it is going to happen as soon as the code is ready, and that is sooner than you think 😉

  8. K Scharf Says:

    There are many libraries from third party shield supplies such as Adafruit and Sparkfun. I hope they can be included into the release. There have been some non-arduino clones with different processors such as the Sanguino which uses the atmega644 or atmega1284P processor. I’d like to see support for those processors. At least make it easy to add a new processor to the Arduino IDE, publish a ‘Howto’ on this. Finally, how about an xmega or avr32 based Arduino?

  9. d.gomba@arduino.cc Says:

    Hi Scharf.
    I appreciate your advice: many libraries you find in the IDE aren’t from the Arduino team (hopefully). We’ll manage to make the IDE as easy and re-usable as possible.

    thanks for commenting,
    Davide

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