My life revolves around three boards: the digi rabbit, an altera FPGA, and a teensy (an arduino-compatible microcontroller).
The provided IDE’s for each of these boards suck, but teensy’s sucks the least. They are ugly and they get in the way of my productivity. Since the code to interface with the boards written in python I’ve been migrating my digi rabbit and altera development to PyCharm. This post documents the errors encountered moving from the arduino IDE to the arduino-builder.
index out of range on Board Resolver
A merged pull request on arduino-builder should prevent this error from occuring in future.
The arduino-builder requires the full board name to be specified as something like package_name:platform_name:board_name . The colons are essential and the arduino-builder will not check to make sure the full board name follows this pattern. If you don’t specify the board in that form, you will get the error:
$ arduino-builder -fqbn teensyLC -hardware ~/arduino-1.6.7/hardware/ -tools ~/arduino-1.6.7/tools experiment_control.ino
panic: runtime error: index out of range
goroutine 1 [running]:
arduino.cc/builder.(*TargetBoardResolver).Run(0x6c3050, 0xc20803c4e0, 0x0, 0x0)
~/arduino-builder/src/arduino.cc/builder/target_board_resolver.go:46 +0xf44
arduino.cc/builder.(*ContainerSetupHardwareToolsLibsSketchAndProps).Run(0x6c3050, 0xc20803c4e0, 0x0, 0x0)
~/arduino-builder/src/arduino.cc/builder/container_setup.go:59 +0x6b8
arduino.cc/builder.runCommands(0xc20803c4e0, 0xc20802db90, 0x1d, 0x1d, 0x418001, 0x0, 0x0)
~/arduino-builder/src/arduino.cc/builder/builder.go:187 +0x139
arduino.cc/builder.(*Builder).Run(0xc20802dd88, 0xc20803c4e0, 0x0, 0x0)
~/arduino-builder/src/arduino.cc/builder/builder.go:118 +0xef7
arduino.cc/builder.RunBuilder(0xc20803c4e0, 0x0, 0x0)
~/arduino-builder/src/arduino.cc/builder/builder.go:218 +0x49
main.main()
~/arduino-builder/main.go:333 +0x1eb2
Resolution
Change the -fqbn parameter to the package_name:platform_name:board_name format. You can guess what this needs to be by looking at the arduino folder structure. For example, my folder structure has:
arduino-1.6.7
└── hardware
├── arduino
└── teensy
└── avr
└── boards.txt
The boards.txt specifies the available boards for that platform. Opening up the file, I can see teensy30, teensy31, and so on. If I change the board name to teensy:avr:teensyLC, the error no longer occurs. Note that this string is case sensitive!
Not finding the arm compiler
You may get the error:
fork/exec /../arm/bin/arm-none-eabi-g++: no such file or directory
Resolution
Set the -tools argument to:
-tools ~/arduino-1.6.7/hardware/tools/
Missing build variables
Because we’re no longer in the arduino IDE, a bunch of menu-specified variables won’t be set. This will result in errors like:
<command-line>:0:1: error: macro names must be identifiers
In file included from ~/arduino-1.6.7/hardware/teensy/avr/cores/teensy3/core_pins.h:34:0,
from ~/arduino-1.6.7/hardware/teensy/avr/cores/teensy3/wiring.h:33,
from ~/arduino-1.6.7/hardware/teensy/avr/cores/teensy3/WProgram.h:15,
from ~/arduino-1.6.7/hardware/teensy/avr/cores/teensy3/Arduino.h:1,
from /tmp/arduino-sketch-55293F9A6EDF8EF849C232A18F1833A8/sketch/experiment_control.ino.cpp:1:
~/arduino-1.6.7/hardware/teensy/avr/cores/teensy3/kinetis.h:568:12: error: operator '==' has no left operand
#if (F_CPU == 180000000)
^
or, alternatively, you may see something like these errors:
arm-none-eabi-g++: error: {build.flags.optimize}: No such file or directory
Resolution
This is a hack (build systems people avert your eyes), but I’ve added:
teensyLC.build.fcpu=48000000
teensyLC.build.flags.optimize=-Os
teensyLC.build.flags.ldspecs=--specs=nano.specs
teensyLC.build.keylayout=US_ENGLISH
teensyLC.build.usbtype=USB_SERIAL
to my boards.txt file.
Ctags file does not exist
The following error may occur when compiling for arduino-branded (i.e., uno, mega, etc) boards:
exec: "{runtime.tools.ctags.path}/ctags": file does not exist
Resolution
When executing arduino-builder, add the argument:
-tools ~/arduino-1.6.7/tools-builder