Board+Port drop-down in Arduino IDE 2.0-rc3, is it Good / Bad / Ugly?

PaulStoffregen

PaulStoffregen

Well-known member
I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the toolbar's Board+Port drop-down menu in Arduino IDE 2.0-rc3.

screenshot.png

Is it useful (let's just imagine a bug-free version)? Or redundant? Or confusing?

Would having this in Arduino 1.8.19 be nice or useful?
 
PaulStoffregen said:
I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the toolbar's Board+Port drop-down menu in Arduino IDE 2.0-rc3.

......

Is it useful (let's just imagine a bug-free version)? Or redundant? Or confusing?

Would having this in Arduino 1.8.19 be nice or useful?
Click to expand...

Good question based on playing with IDE2 I think I would tend to use it more (the drop down as shown) and its nice to have/useful right there instead of going to tools/port to change it when switching boards. Would I consider it a high priority over other things for 1.8.19 is another question. But then on the other hand might be useful for IDE2 development to show how it should be done :)
 
If it were fully functional, I think it can be a very nice feature.

That is for example if I can have boards open, and simply choosing one of these items in the list, automatically sets up things like, which board type it is, which serial port and hopefully for example which USB type, then it makes it easier to work on multiple things...

Obviously they have issues with current RC, like the Serial monitor only works on one and the like. Also maybe issues with do I want to work as COM32 or do I want to work as Teensy ...

But is it worth putting into 1.8.19? hard one to answer, as there are lots of things to keep us busy....
 
I'm not sure I'm there with such an option. I see how it can provide quicker access to selecting a board / port, but I'm not sure how often I'm picking a different board for an INO. Most of my code is board specific (my Teeny-based INO's with ILI9341_t3 will not compile on a NANO).

What I do struggle with is the board not begin remembered for each INO. I open my IDE and the board defaults to the last chosen board. I generally have 3 MCU's I'm coding for Teeny 3.2, Teeny 4.0, and an ESP32 (rarely Arduino's but on occasion). Each sketch is board specific yet I have to chose the board every time I open an INO. This option will make that selection easier, but it really shouldn't be needed at all if the board was saved with the INO.

Imagine this open ino, change a line compile done as opposed to open ino, change a line, compile, get a board warning error, change the option, recompile...
 
KrisKasprzak said:
I'm not sure I'm there with such an option. I see how it can provide quicker access to selecting a board / port, but I'm not sure how often I'm picking a different board for an INO. Most of my code is board specific (my Teeny-based INO's with ILI9341_t3 will not compile on a NANO).

What I do struggle with is the board not begin remembered for each INO. I open my IDE and the board defaults to the last chosen board. I generally have 3 MCU's I'm coding for Teeny 3.2, Teeny 4.0, and an ESP32 (rarely Arduino's but on occasion). Each sketch is board specific yet I have to chose the board every time I open an INO. This option will make that selection easier, but it really shouldn't be needed at all if the board was saved with the INO.

Imagine this open ino, change a line compile done as opposed to open ino, change a line, compile, get a board warning error, change the option, recompile...
Click to expand...

In general many sketches are board specific. But a lot of the sketches I write aren't. I have simple sketches that drive the various neopixel/ws2812b light projects that I do, and they have various #ifdefs to set the defaults for the pins used based on the current board de-jure.

My sketch for doing a neopixel ring for my wooden bowtie has been run on an Arduino Uno (AVR 328p), AVR 32u4 clone, Teensy LC, Teensy 3.2, Teensy 4.0, Adafruit Gemma M0, and Adafruit Trinket M0. I don't recall if I ran it on some of the feather boards (M0 express, M4 express, Huzzah, Sense, etc.).

My sketch for doing Uncanny Eyes has migrated from the Teensy 3.2, to Teensy 3.5/3.6, to Teensy 4.0/4.1. I have it set up to change the default display based on the microprocessor that is being run (i.e. Teensy 3.2 might have the original TFT 128x128 display, the 3.5/3.6 might have the OLED 128x128 display, while the Teensy 4.0/4.1 has the larger TFT 240x240 display).
 
Having two ESP32 PICO units on my desk - swapping between them is a hassle in IDE 1.8.19: pick board, change port
- one a released product the original TinyPICO
- the other a smaller new design Rev1 doing function testing against TinyPICO

Using a Week old RC3 of IDE2 - that shows PROMISE!
> Register a Board and associated port! Then being able to jump between them
-> Something created a .JSON in the sketch folder and also a '.theia' folder, maybe that was for recording the settings?

Time to update to a new RC3 release to see if it functions better yet. But if it actually did what is 'promised' in IDE 2 or if backported into IDE 1.X.XX that would be very handy/nice and not confusing or redundant.
-> though unless it keeps each build in a unique TEMP, or allow the same sketch open twice, in this case it would still end up doing a FULL/Clean build on each swap.
 
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