Overview of the changes coming in Arduino 1.0

David Mellis
Arduino

July 19, 2010

Over the past few years, the Arduino software has come a long way, in both features and robustness. There are a lot of little things, however, that we never really thought about or that we’d like to change. Arduino 1.0 is our chance to clean up these details and establish a stable platform for the future.

There’s a detailed list of the changes [ http://code.google.com/p/arduino/issues/list?q=milestone=1.0 ] planned or considered for Arduino 1.0 on our development site (hosted by Google Code). The main items include:

Environment:

New file extension to replace the .pde borrowed from Processing (issue #13).
Redesigned toolbar icons (issue #291).
Ability to upload sketches using an in-system programmer (ISP) from the IDE (issue #260).
Simplifying the process of selecting your board and serial port (issues #223 and #257).
Command-line compilation and uploading of sketches (issue #124).

Language (most of these are possibilities and still open for discussion):

Creating events that can be called automatically, e.g. the serialEvent() as in Processing (issue #263).
Adding specific functions for enabling / disabling the internal pullup resistors (issue #246).
Modifying the behavior of print() on bytes (issue #284).
Functions for accessing more of the low-level functionality of the hardware timers and other peripherals (issues #169 and #248).
Optimizing the digitalWrite() function (issue #140).

Of course, we’ll continue to make improvements and additions to the software after Arduino 1.0, but that by making the incompatible changes together, we’ll make the transition clearer and easier. Once you’ve adopted your code to Arduino 1.0, it should continue to work going forward.

If you have questions, comments or suggestions, feel free to respond here or to post on the individual items. Contributions are welcome; please sign up for the developers mailing list [ http://mail.arduino.cc/mailman/listinfo/developers_arduino.cc ] if you’re interested in working on the Arduino software.