Having now used this IDE for several weeks straight, I am pretty happy with the Eclipse Arduino Plugin. The project is pretty active on GitHub , and the author is also quite nice :)

The Case for Open Source

One of the first things I bumped into, with the nightly build of the plugin and with my Arduino Esplora board, was a pretty major problem: I couldn’t upload any sketches. So I posted a bug report on GitHub, and author replied with a quick note on how to get the source of the plugin, and which class to look at, so that I could fix the problem. It sounded like a challenge. Of course I took it.

For the next few hours instead of working on my Arduino sketch I was fixing the Eclipse plugin. To my surprise, it was relatively easy to get setup with the environment where I imported the entire plugin source into JetBrains IDEA (haha, sorry Eclipse! You are still number two :) and was able to diagnose and fix the issue with the timing of opening serial port and uploading the sketch. A few hours later my pull request was merged, and the nightly build of Eclipse Plugin started working for everyone with Arduino Esplora! That, my friends, is the true power of open source.

While I was at it, I also updated the README with proper markdown and (perhaps) slightly better English. And of course I couldn’t stop there either, and continued going slightly crazy, massively refactoring serial communications of the plugin deep into the night, and then submitting a beautiful pull request. However, at that point the plugin author probably had gotten pretty annoyed that I was making his code look and work a bit better, and sadly rejected the PR, explaining that another rewrite of serial comms is happening. Oh well, at least I can keep using my fork on my own machine, where I get to see pretty error messages that actually explain what’s going on :)