I've been playing with the Arduino development boards and tools. I'm not a fan of their IDE at all and I'm still not convinced either way regarding the practicality of the Wiring library. On the one hand it makes the time to first upload really short, but on the other hand it's slow as a dog and on the gripping hand there is a whole lot of code writing around those libraries to support very interesting hardware. I'm really keen to see if I can get by just using make, Vim and avr-libc. This repository is where I'm going to be doing that experimentation.
Currently there's rather a large barrier to go from the dead simple Arduino IDE - which handles all of the project management, compiling, linking and uploading with one button - to writing raw avr-libc code, compiling, linking and uploading to the boards. I'm currently working on a Makefile which reads the boards.txt file shipped with the Arduino IDE to configure the parameters needed for compiling and uploading to the different Arduino Development boards. This will hopefully address the C-Code to Arduino-Board steps and let me get my hands dirty with programming straight on top of avr-libc.
Currently the Makefile in this repository is capable of building and uploading a .hex file to my Arduino. It has only been tested with my Atmega328p based 16MHz Duemilanove but I'll try it out on my Atmega328V based 8MHz Lilypad soon and then get the other members of Make, Hack, Void to lend my their Arduinos for a minute or two while I test them.
###Windows###
Install WinAVR and make sure that your PATH environment variable has been updated to include the gnu bin-utils, avr-libc and gcc-avr directories.
###Linux###
Install gcc-avr, avr-libc and avrdude from your favorite package manager.
###MacOSX###
I don't actually know. I'll see if I can get someone to test this.
Edit the ARDUINO_VERSION and the AVRDUDE_PORT variables in the top of the Makefile; to match the first section (everything up to the first '.') of the board definition that matches the Arduino you are using; and the location of the port that your Arduino is connected to respectively.
On Windows you can see the COM port numbers in the Device Manager and on Linux they appear as /dev/ttyUSB* device nodes. Again, I'll have to follow up on correct port on MacOSX.
Change to the directory you have downloaded/cloned the repository to and run:
make make program # at the some time as you reset your Arduino
This should load the blink test program into your Arduino. If not, raise an issue on this repository and I'll look into it.
Blinking LEDs are great but you're probably looking at this repository because you want to do more than just blink an LED.
The first thing I would suggest doing is messing around with the delay time to make sure that rebuilding and programming really is working.
If you want to start a new project with a new name you will need to change the TARGET variable in the makefile to match the name of the new .c file you're working with. Do not include the extension or the Makefile will get really confused.
- Test with more Arduinos
- Pulse the DTR line on the COM/ttyUSB port to reset before uploading.
- Support for more than one Source file
- Support for a 'libraries' like directory
- Support for MacOSX
- Automatically link in the Wiring libraries?