Keeping the Arduino website in motion
We never rest, even during summer, to serve our community and we announce today that we’ve refreshed over 150 example pages and redesigned the Examples area, offering an updated support to the current Arduino Software (IDE) Built-in and Libraries examples
Our website is a living entity that everyday hosts a huge number of visitors. They are looking for software, information, guidelines, ideas and also the right tutorial to start tinkering with their new board on a specific issue or project.
The Reference is the place where everything is documented and explained, with dry and essential information that is also included locally with every Arduino Software (IDE) installation.
Our software also includes a number of built-in sketches that help our users to quickly understand how the various functions and libraries may be used and applied to specific projects and tasks. We all started with the famous Blink and at the end of this tutorial we all felt the power and the excitement of having tamed our board with the upload of our first sketch. Keeping all these examples in good shape and updated is essential to keep you users safe from troubles or difficulties.
These examples evolve, as the libraries also evolve, therefore the sketches may be updated, amended or added. Each of these examples is commented and has an introductory part that gives a description of the purpose of the sketch and – if necessary – the instructions to put together the circuit. We know that the information provided inside the IDE and the sketches is not enough and therefore we made an area of our website where each sketch is explained and documented.
Year after year, board after board and library after library, many “hands” contributed to this area, filling gaps and amending things to reflect the Arduino Software (IDE) status. It has been an ongoing process that inevitably brought the Tutorials area in a state where many styles and ways of explaining things merged. We have big plans for our www.arduino.cc website and it is important to clean and fix the existing areas before we add new contents. This is why my first task – as editorial manager – has been the refresh and overall alignment of our Examples and Examples from Libraries pages.
We have roughly 150 pages documenting our Examples for the current products and libraries and going through them all wasn’t exactly a piece of cake: many things were checked for each example and sometimes things were outdated or missing. We also have our sister brand Genuino that got its space in all the relevant example pages. Now contents, style, look and feel and links in this area are ready for new and fresh developments.
I would like to end this post adding that this task was also a very good opportunity to refresh my knowledge about the powerful capabilities of Arduino programming language and its libraries. I had a few doubts on how to do a few things in my own sketches and going through all the examples gave me the hints I was missing.
The plain list of examples available in the Arduino Software (IDE) is just made of the sketch names, conversely in our pages you find a brief description of each of them. I suggest that you wander through these descriptions: let them excite your curiosity and inspire you!