I really love the Arduino, because after all it was what started all this.
The one thing I don’t like is the IDE that comes with it. It’s not the IDE’s fault, It’s just that I’m a console guy and I don’t really like IDEs in general (and yes, I’ve seen others and I think this one is not particularly good). Luckily there are ways around it, like Makefiles that automatically include all the needed libraries and even upload the sketch to the board. There are several of these out there, and I went with this one which is a slightly modified version of this one. The Makefile is pretty good as is, but I added a few minor changes:
- The Makefile can search for libraries in ~/sketchbook/libraries, but instead of the ~/sketchbook folder I use ~/src/arduino, so I just replaced that.
- It reads the boards.txt file in the Arduino installation directory but I have my own boards.txt in ~/src/arduino, where I added my own boards, so I changed that path, too.
- The setup howto suggests that you symlink the file to your sketch-directories, but if you do that, you’d still have to set the environment variable $BOARD to the right type, which I found a bit tedious. So instead of symlink it, I create a new Makefile in each sketch folder that contains only two lines: The first one sets $BOARD to the board type that sketch uses, and the other just includes the original Makefile.
The result is a very tidy build system with no redundancies whatsoever.
As usual everything can be downloaded in my github repository: