Native support for Teensy 3.0 with Arduino 1.5 ??

andym

New member
Have ordered my first couple of Teensy boards and while waiting have been setting up the development environment.

First discovery that the Teensy S/W requires the 'AVR' version of Arduino (1.0.x) and not the new 'ARM' version (1.5). This makes complete sense based upon where the product has come from etc however raises the question of future direction.

What is the future direction for Teensy 'IDE' support -- plans to migrate support into the arduino 1.5 code base and if so what is the time frame etc -- or do you think it will stay with the 1.0.x support ?

Thanks
Andy
 
What is the future direction for Teensy 'IDE' support -- plans to migrate support into the arduino 1.5 code base and if so what is the time frame etc -- or do you think it will stay with the 1.0.x support ?

I'm waiting until at least 1.5.3 before supporting the 1.5.x series. That doesn't necessarily Teensyduino will support 1.5.3... it might be delayed until 1.5.4 or even 1.5.5.

Much of the decision depends on what the Arduino Team releases in 1.5.3, 1.5.4, etc.... and when. One thing is certain now, they've recently added important changes to how the new IDE supports 3rd party boards and libraries (and more are being discussed even now), so targeting 1.5.2 would not be a good use of time with so many structural changes pending for 1.5.3.

Also factoring into the decision is what extra benefits 1.5.x has for using Teensy. Right now, the answer is "not much". Teensyduino installs an ARM toolchain into 1.0.5, and it will do so when 1.5.3 (or later) is supported. Teensy uses a newer version of the toolchain than Arduino Due, and sometime in the next several months I plan to upgrade to gcc 4.8 and explore enabling LTO. Unless the Arduino Team happens to switch to exactly the same version with exactly the same multilib options, Teensyduino will handle 1.0.x and 1.5.x pretty much the same way. Just because 1.5.x ships with an ARM toolchain doesn't mean it's optimal for use with the ARM-based Teensy3.

Long-term, the 1.5.x will add nice features. As these develop and mature, I'll be much more inclined to support 1.5.x, if I haven't already. For example, 1.5.x will be adding support for metadata in the libraries. At this time, this feature is merely a rough spec mentioned on the Arduino developers mail list seeking comments. Eventually, 1.5.x will presumably do something useful with this metadata, and the many Arduino libraries will be updated to include it. But at the rate things are going, that appears to be a long way off in the future....

In the meantime, I have a lot of other stuff planned. The short term plan is to continue expanding the list of officially supported libraries. SoftPWM was added only days ago, and I'm working on VirtualWire now. I have a big box of hardware here, just waiting to be hooked up and tested. Unless 1.5.x suddenly become stable and/or adds compelling features, 1.5.x support is going to remain a lower priority than other work which will bring you real benefits.
 
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