Skip to content

Set-up boards in Arduino IDE

The boards definitions are the definitions that associate a board and it’s microcontroller to the configurations files in an Arduino Core. Basically, they tell the Arduino IDE how to interact to your particular board. Some of them are installed by default, but some are not - here we see how to add them.

Add Additional Board Manager URLs

This adds online resources from where we can fetch board definitions. Go to: Preferences > Additional Board Manager URLs

There, add the boards sources. One line per URL:

Recommended setup

For fabacademy, we recommend adding the following:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/damellis/attiny/ide-1.6.x-boards-manager/package_damellis_attiny_index.json http://arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json https://adafruit.github.io/arduino-board-index/package_adafruit_index.json http://drazzy.com/package_drazzy.com_index.json https://www.mattairtech.com/software/arduino/beta/package_MattairTech_index.json https://dl.espressif.com/dl/package_esp32_index.json

Install the boards

Go to Tools > Board > Board Manager and navigate to the Board you want, for instance, ESP32. Then press Install:

Now, you should find your board in the list:

Danger

If you don’t find it, make sure that the sources url are fine.

Extra-ball: setup the IDE nicely

For making our lives easier, you can set up the prefecences in the Arduino IDE like this:

The important ones are:

  • Show verbose output during both, compilation and upload: ✔️
  • Display line numbers: ✔️
  • Verify code after upload: ✔️
  • Enable Code Folding: ✔️