I'm not even sure where to post this, so I'l, start here. Feel free to direct me to a more appropriate location if this is the wrong place to post this.
First, I just finished my first Quadcopter based on the Arducopter platform. While the frame is home made based on the Arducopter design, my flight control electronics are the same as the Arducopter includng the CPU, IMU, GPS, and compass.
First, hats off to the software / hardware design. It flies great right "out of the box".
I have written a fair amount of code and have a few industry specific apps for the Mac that I have written and sold, so I'm not new to writing code. That being said, I am totally new to the Arduino IDE and I'm really frustrated with it due to the lack of simple tools like global find and replace, etc. As I'm trying to learn and figure out the code base, I'm finding it difficult to follow functions and variables through the various source code files. I suppose I could load the files in to a good multi-file text editor, but it wouldn't be integrated into the development environment.
My question is this: Is there a better, more full featured IDE for Arduino that I can use that has a bit more refined / advanced IDE feature set? What are the hard core Ardupilot / Arducopter software guys using to work on this code? I'm happy to pay for a better more full featured IDE.
Any ideas or suggestions would be much appreciated. I'm anxious to see how I can make this environment more user friendly to speed up my learning / modification / enhancement of the software.
Thank you!
Bill Sanford
Replies
Hi Bill,
The dev team members typically do no coding work in the Arduino IDE. We make sure that all code can be built using only the Arduino IDE, so that users have a simple environment with which to load code. However, as you have found, it has limitations for actually working on the code.
Dev team members use a variety of tools. Those of us who are not pro programmers tend to use a full featured text editor like Notepad++. That will supply you with the sort of features you mention. If you set the preferences in Arduino IDE to "Use external editor" then it will pull current versions of all the files each time it builds, so other than having 2 windows open it is not much different than having a bit better IDE. The pro programmers in the group use pro-level tools like the Eclipse IDE...