I’ve been playing with the Arduino Microcontroller for quite some time. It is a fantastic open source hardware project which really opens up the world of Microcontrollers to people all over the world. The developers on the project have included a development environment written in Java. I’m a huge fan of TextMate. I decided to write a plugin for TextMate which allows you to:
- choose the microcontroller architecture – Atmega 8, Atmega 168, and the Make Controller (forthcoming).
- Compile and upload to the Microcontroller
- Show a Serial Monitor using the OSX terminal
Installation
UPDATE: This has been modified for the current release
Install the Arduino 0010 release from arduino.cc.
download: Microcontroller.tmplugin
unzip it to ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Plugins.
Building
When you build from TextMate, you need to do a few things differently. First, include wprogram.h, and add a main loop. Here’s the template:
#include <WProgram.h>
void setup()
{
}
void loop()
{
}
int main()
{
init();
setup();
while (1)
loop();
return 0;
}
About the binary
I’d consider this a .1 release; It hasn’t been well tested. Because of this, there will be bugs.
Future Enhancements
- User specified makefile (something that gets included into the build process instead of manually walking the tree).
- Make controller support.
- Hot Keys for building
- Don’t leak so much
Feedback
If you’d like to send feedback or request features, send them to louie at ooeygui.