Electron IDE

New web based Arduino IDE, not affiliated with the official Arduino projects.

Very early stages. Just compilation and basic editing works right now, plus some library stuff. You must be comfortable with the command line right now. All paths are currently hard coded for Mac.

To try it out do:

• have NodeJS and NPM installed
• check out the code: git clone https://github.com/joshmarinacci/ElectronIDE
• install all deps with cd ElectronIDE; npm install
• run node electron
• open your browser to http://localhost:54329/

A note on Linux

In theory Electron should just work on Linux since it's just javascript underneath. However, some users have reported that some Linux distros (certainly Debian-based) have an existing program called node that is actually an ancient packet radio program. Try running node --version to make sure you really have NodeJS 10.x and not that other program. Uninstall it if you do. NodeJS might also be run as nodejs instead of node. On Ubuntu 14.04 we have reports that the nodejs-legacy package can successfully run Electron, which is to say you have to install it AND nodejs, which allows running it as node and nodejs.

What's New?

Version 0.4b3 released

Electron has a brand new UI built with UIKit and AngularJS. Electron works as a .app bundle now on Mac. Other platforms should use commandline install. settings.js is no longer used. Instead you can use the settings dialog. There are probably tons of bugs due to the UI changes. Please file issues. I'll get to them ASAP.

Version 0.1 released

I'm happy to announce Electron v0.1. This release has a ton of fixes to the toolchain. It should support 3rd party libs properly, and has preliminary support for Linux. I've also made a bunch of small GUI tweaks and the first attempt at a serial console.

For this release please test compiling all of your sketches to see where it breaks. Undoubtedly we will have more libraries and compiler fixes to add. File issues on the github project:

https://github.com/joshmarinacci/ElectronIDE

Special thanks to friends of the show Sean McCarthy, HippyJake, and Dean Iverson for their patches.

Thanks, Josh

Want to help?

Don't worry. There's tons to do.

If you want to help on the Node side, you can work on

• support proper software reset on Unos (setting DTR high?)
• figure out how to extract documentation from Arduino library source directly (doxygen?) see #56 for further discussion
• help with Windows integration with the embedded webkit from Atom.io (Atom-Shell)

If you want to help on the HTML side, you can work on

• Pick better defaults for the Ace editor. Syntax highlighting, themes, search, etc.

If you want to help with metadata, you can add to the repo:

• new boards to the database
• more extensive board information: number of pins, voltage, diagrams,
• new common libraries to the database
• more extensive lib info, like alternate versions of AccelStepper for other platforms

And of course everyone must test test test.

Roadmap

• v0.1 work on the build toolchain. work on linux. properly async. autoinstall libs recursively.
• v0.2 switch to downloading platform toolchains on demand from git repos. support linux and windows fully.
• v0.3 work on new gui: better filepicker, library picker, serial port auto-connect,
• v0.4 support RFDuino, Teensyduino, Trinket, other alt-platforms.

Future features:

• firmata console
• code completion
• measurement console

Architecture

There are three components:

• The NodeJS side handles actually compiling and uploading sketches, as well as all on disk tasks like installing libraries and opening sketches.
• The HTML side which is the GUI. The text editor is using Ace
• A metadata repo containing lists of all known boards and libraries, in machine readable form (JSON files). repo

Platform design:

The platform abstraction encompasses both the host operating system and the target platform. The target platform is larger than just a board. It is the architecture and surrounding details. Initally we have one platform: AVR.
With the Due we have two AVR and SAM, which is ARM based. Some Arduino derivatives are based on the AVR or ARM platforms, but have their own variations that we must account for. This may involve adding extra files, or modifying existing ones, or modifying the upload process. So, all of this needs to be accounted for in the ‘platform’ abstraction. that’s a tall order.

Since we probably won’t get it right the first time, the platform abstraction will be internal initially. It will not be in the arduino-data repo. updating the platforms will require updating the IDE.

A key feature of platforms is that they can be downloaded on demand, and only the parts needed for the target host are required. Eventually they will be fully versioned as well, but until we find definitive sources and version information, it will just come from static zips that I host.

The official Arduino IDE consists of the following parts:

• exe, not needed for us
• drivers, for now we assume that the user has installed drivers already. really only needed on Windows.
• examples, we don’t include example code yet, so don’t worry about it.
• hardware:
  • arduino: board defs, boot loaders, cores, variants. basically a bunch of hex files and C++ code
  • tools: the AVR toolchain
• java: the core of the IDE. we don’t use it.
• lib: support libs for the java IDE. don’t need.
• libraries: source for the standard arduino libs. we do need theses
• reference: copy of the web HTML docs. we aren’t doing docs yet, so don’t need it.
• tools: a java based code mangler. I don’t think we need it.

This means we really just need the hardware dir and the libraries dir. Everything else can go. While there is some shared between platforms, (like the libraries dir) for now it will be just one big zip that gets downloaded.