Tag Archives: Arduino Software

Arduino IDE 1.6.1 has been released

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The newly-launched Arduino IDE comes with a number of improved features. 

For years, the open-source Arduino IDE has enabled millions of Makers to easily write code and upload it onto the highly-popular, Atmel based boards. The program — which is written in Java and based on Processing among other open-source software — runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. And today, the team has announced the availability of the Arduino IDE 1.6.1 — an improved version of last month’s update.

IDE1-1.6.1-03-03

“Since the day we started developing the first 1.5 version we have received a lot of feedback, suggestions and contributions from our vibrant community and we would like to thank you all for your passion and goodwill,” Arduino shared in its recent blog post.

1.6.1 is packed with a number of new features, including:

  • Support for multiple platforms
  • Boards are detected and listed on “ports list” menu together with the serial port
  • Drivers and IDE are now signed for Windows and MacOSX
  • Improved speed of build process
  • Autosave when compiling/uploading sketch
  • A lot of improvements of the serial monitor (faster, backed by modern JSSC serial library instead of old RXTX)
  • Find/replace over multiple tabs
  • Improved lots of Arduino API libraries (String, Serial, Print, etc.)
  • Tools & toolchains upgrades (avr-gcc, arm-gcc, avrdude, bossac, etc.)
  • Command line interface
  • IDE reports both sketch size and static RAM usage
  • Editor shows line numbers
  • Scrollable menus when many entries are listed
  • Upload via network (Yún)
  • HardwareSerial has been improved
  • USB has got some stability and performance improvements
  • SPI library now supports “transactions” for better interoperability when using multiple SPI devices at the same time
  • Better support to 3rd party hardware vendors with configuration files (platform.txt and boards.txt)
  • Submenus with board configuration can now be defined
  • Fix for upload problems on Leonardo, Micro and Yún.
  • Libraries bundled with Arduino have been improved and bugfixed, in particular: Bridge, TFT, Ethernet, Robot_Control, SoftwareSerial, GSM
  • A lot of minor bugs of the user interface have been fixed

Upon releasing version 1.6.0, the team notes that it received quite a bit of feedback on Github, via email and across online forums. As a result, the following issues have already been resolved:

  • Improved Yún discovery mechanism
  • Better SoftwareSerial library
  • Native dialogs on MacOSX on the Java 7+ experimental version
  • Improved library name matching, so IRemote library won’t conflict with RobotIRremote library
  • Fixed bug on Windows when attempting to open a sketch by double clicking it

According to Arduino, they are currently working on 1.6.2, which will entail some very useful elements and user experience enhancements.