Programming Linux Devices With Arduino And The Cloud

Back in the olden days, when the Wire library still sucked, the Arduino was just a microcontroller. Now, we have single board computers and cheap microcontrollers with WiFi built in. As always, there’s a need to make programming and embedded development more accessible and more widely supported among the hundreds of devices available today.

At the Embedded Linux Conference this week, [Massimo Banzi] announced the beginning of what will be Arduino’s answer to the cloud, online IDEs, and a vast ecosystem of connected devices. It’s Arduino Create, an online IDE that allows anyone to develop embedded projects and manage them remotely.

As demonstrated in [Massimo]’s keynote, the core idea of Arduino Create is to put a connected device on the Internet and allow over-the-air updates and development. As this is Arduino, the volumes of libraries available for hundreds of different platforms are leveraged to make this possible. Right now, a wide variety of boards are supported, including the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, and several Intel IoT boards.

The focus of this development is platform-agnostic and focuses nearly entirely on ease of use and interoperability. This is a marked change from the Arduino of five years ago; there was a time when the Arduino was an ATmega328p, and that’s about it. A few years later, you could put Arduino sketches on an ATtiny85. A lot has changed since then. We got the Raspberry Pi, we got Intel stepping into the waters of IoT devices, we got a million boards based on smartphone SoCs, and Intel got out of the IoT market.

While others companies and organizations have already made inroads into an online IDE for Raspberry Pis and other single board computers, namely the Adafruit webIDE and Codebender, this is a welcome change that already has the support of the Arduino organization.

You can check out [Massimo]’s keynote below.

28 thoughts on “Programming Linux Devices With Arduino And The Cloud

  1. Wire library still sucks, and Arduino “IDE” is still not better than Notepad. Buying Chinese knock off, code using a decent editor like Atom+platform IO, use AVR-GCC if you are still stuck into limited Atmel products, is a way more rewarding path than this lame Atduino

    1. My vote is also for platformio, but it is a very flexible platform which can be used with any decent IDE. I tend to use Qt Creator. Platformio also supports the “mbed” framework without all the clould/mist stuff. And with mbed a shitload of ARM (cortex-m3 and other) boards and uC’s from different manufacturers.

      I find it hard to believe some people still buy USD25 “arduino” boards with a simple USD2.5 uC and a few connectors with an absolutely horrible pinout.

    1. No it’s not weird. Same here.
      CLI gives you power and productivity, flexibility and control.
      In the clouds / mist youre lulled into sleep by big companies which steal your IP before you are ready to release it as a proper Open Source project :)

  2. Seriously who cares? If someone wants to develop on a Linux platform, please learn how to use it properly.

    Nothing that these cloud tools do can’t be done with SSH and maybe some X11 tunneling to run a GUI app on the remote machine remotely

  3. The first time I connected a BeagleBone Black to my pc via a single USB cable (no power cord!) I could type an URL in a web browser and write a progrom in “node.js” in the web browser directly on the BeagleBone.
    That’s HTTP over USB. and it “Just works” on my linux box. For another OS they had a multi page manual for the same.

    Then I found an power supply & ethernet cable and configured SSH for some more serious development.

    A few days ago I stumbled into a nice recent (2018-02) overview of small SBC’s:
    http://linuxgizmos.com/ringing-in-2018-with-103-hacker-friendly-sbcs/
    http://linuxgizmos.com/january-2018-catalog-of-hacker-friendly-sbcs/

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