> As far as I can tell this targets only Arduino micro controllers. This appears to be the case[1], in fact it currently needs the Arduino IDE to be installed

> As far as I can tell this targets only Arduino micro controllers. This appears to be the case[1], in fact it currently needs the Arduino IDE to be installed as well to work, though it appears they plan to expand to a wide range of platforms in future. > Anyone like to comment on how it compares to other Arduino IDEs? The official Arduino IDE is pretty terrible IMO, lacking autocomplete, a tree view, code folding etc. It does however make things very simple for beginners, with a big "upload" button making your code run immediately, and has the basics like syntax highlighting. There are a few other Arduino IDEs available[2], as well as command line tools like ino[3] to compile Arduino sketches without needing the IDE, and there are plugins available for Visual Studio, Eclipse, Sublime Text etc, so you can use a much nicer text editor if you need to. The articles IDE adds in symbol navigation (no autocomplete yet, listed as todo), and shows you a nice visual pie chart of how much flash/ram you have used. It also has a few other neat features like auto setting the serial baud rate[4]. It uses brackets.io[5] as its text editor, so presumably has all the text editing features that has too. The main problem with the Arduino IDE is the lack of any debugging support that isn't serial output. No single step, no memory view, no breakpoints. This is fundamentally a problem with the hardware, as to keep the cost low the Arduino was designed to use a serial bootloader rather than a separate microcontroller to act as a debug interface. When dealing with intermittent hardware bugs, this can be very painful indeed. You can splash out on an external debug adaptor and debug your sketch with Eclipse[6], though this certainly isn't as beginner friendly. Similar priced boards like TI's MSP430 Launchpad, or Freescale's FRDM boards now come with debug hardware built in, but they are a lot less beginner friendly. [1] http://apla.github.io/cuwire/cli/Platforms/ http://apla.github.io/cuwire/cli/Platforms/ [2] http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/DevelopmentTools http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/DevelopmentTools [3] http://inotool.org http://inotool.org [4] http://apla.github.io/cuwire/gui/FeaturesSerialMon/ http://apla.github.io/cuwire/gui/FeaturesSerialMon/ [5] http://brackets.io http://brackets.io [6] http://awtfy.com/2012/03/29/hardware-debugging-the-arduino-using-eclipse-and-the-avr-dragon/ http://awtfy.com/2012/03/29/hardware-debugging-the-arduino-u...