Online interactive development environments (IDE) have taken off during the recent years. Traditionally, local IDEs were considered the best tools for programming as they were usually faster than their online counterparts. But the arrival of new web programming frameworks and the standardisation of high-speed internet connections have improved the user experience of interactive editors using browsers.
Arduino’s popular online IDE is a widely used tool for programming not only Arduino boards but also 3rd party hardware. Improving the user’s experience including or changing features is part of its dynamic nature, always based on the developers’ experience and feedback.
Online editing is full of advantages
A number of online editors and IDEs have flourished leveraging the new capabilities that make them stand out over the traditional local ones.
Remove portability issues
Installing an application to your custom operating system should be a straightforward task, but experience says that it is usually painful to struggle with compatibility issues of your system libraries or drivers. Having a centralised online editor helps you get focused on coding and not maintaining your editor.
Zero setup
Configuration can also be a headache for the non-skilled users that find it difficult to fine tune all the knobs of themes, fonts, plugins and settings. An online editor with a predefined set of configurations simplifies the developer’s lives.
Store your projects online
Storing your projects online you have your data safe. Hard disks, USB sticks or SD cards get corrupted eventually so having your projects stored by default on the cloud prevents you from creating periodic backups to keep your data safe.
Additionally, you can access your fully configured editor with all your projects from anywhere. This is crucial for the new paradigm where mobility is a key factor.
Share projects
The open source world is based on collaboration and having your projects online, you have the ability to share it with your colleagues or other community developers.
Building Arduino projects in minutes with Arduino Cloud
The Arduino cloud editor is the online Arduino alternative to the popular Arduino IDE. It makes use of all the advantages described above, as you can store all of your sketches online, it requires no installation and it includes most of the most popular libraries. This reduces the learning curve and speeds up your development as you can simply focus on your project.
If you still want to work eventually locally, you can synchronise your cloud sketches with your local editor using Arduino IDE 2.0.
Furthermore, you can leverage the full potential of the Arduino IoT Cloud creating software for your connected devices that you can manage from customisable dashboards and with the ability to update remotely the devices’ software.
New compilation terms for the Free plan
The Arduino Cloud has different plans that fit different developers’ needs. One of the current limits of the Free plan was the constraint of having a maximum of 200 seconds of compilation time per day.
The online editor supports all Arduino boards and other 3rd party hardware based on ESP32 and ESP8266. Each of these boards have different processors with different capabilities and it was a fact that compiling for the lower end processors was much faster than compiling for the newest and high-end ones.
Instead of using a time limit, it is more sensible to use a limit based on the number of compilations that does not penalise the more resource-hungry ones.
Always close and sensitive to the community’s demands, Arduino has decided to improve the general users experience by changing the limit of the free plan to 25 successful compilations per day instead of the traditional 200 seconds of successful compilations per day.
The average sketch compilation time is around 10s, so the new limit of 25 compilations will be an effective improvement for most of the users. The policy of counting only successful compilations will be still valid so that no typos or other programming mistakes penalise the limit.
This compilation limit does not apply to sketches that use the IoT Cloud agent. Learn more about how to get started with the Arduino IoT Cloud service here.
Start coding Arduino online
Learn how to get started with the Web Editor with a step-by-step guide and start coding.
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