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Improved support for third-party hardware in Arduino 0018

David MellisFebruary 7th, 2010

Given the increasing numbers of boards and microcontrollers to which people have ported the Arduino core libraries, we wanted to make it easier to add third-party hardware to the Arduino development environment. The recently released Arduino 0018 (download) adds support for the installation of contributed cores and board definitions within the Arduino sketchbook folder. This saves you from having to dig around within the Arduino application as was required in previous versions and also ensures that the boards will remain when you upgrade to newer Arduino releases.

To install, simply place the third-party hardware folder in a sub-folder of the “hardware” folder of your sketchbook folder (see the instructions on the environment page). When you relaunch Arduino, the new boards will automatically appear in your Tools > Board menu and code will compile using their custom core libraries. To put together an installable platform for a particular hardware configuration, see the platforms page in the Arduino Google Code project.

This support isn’t perfect yet, but we hope it will make it easier to work with other hardware from within the Arduino development environment. If you have suggestions, please send them to the developers mailing list or post them in the Google Code issues list.

Categories:Software

2 Responses to “Improved support for third-party hardware in Arduino 0018”

  1. Arduino 18 is out! « adafruit industries blog Says:

    […] we forgot to post up about this. Arduino 18 is out! There’s improved support for 3rd party hardware, […]

  2. Paul Reichert Says:

    I think this is a great step. It would be great if there would be a repository or something similar for alternative core files. I find it still difficult to get detailed instructions how to adapt the core files for a specific mcu. (I did not find something and so I had to compare alternative core files with the arduino core. But as an not so experienced mcu programmer this is an unconvinient way) I think arduino would make a big step if there were more core files and instructions how to make them easily available.

    Greetings from Germany

    Paul

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