Test Driving Arduino

I gave a workshop for the Columbus Arduino and Raspberry Pi Enthusiasts (CARPE) Tuesday night. We had a great time and I thought it would be a good idea to share the experience and my motivation creating the workshop here.

The Arduino IDE isn’t what I’d call good. It’s great for someone new to programming or microcontrollers. It gets you from zero to blinking a light in seconds, but lacks a lot of features that seasoned programmers rely on. It has a myriad of problems.

• No file browser.
• No terminal.
• No code navigation (like “Go to declaration”).
• Code is hidden away where it’s hard find and get into source control.
• No way to create automated unit tests.
• Arduino libs aren’t always well behaved (SoftwareSerial and OneWire are notorious for globally disabling interrupts).

A few months ago I set out to see if I could some of these problems. My main goal was to be able to TDD microcontroller code. The secondary goal was to be able to use whichever editor I liked. I figured I would probably need to use a different editor anyway.