Hodentek: Visual Studio 2013 community

Sunday, May 01, 2016

Internet of Things: Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition and Arduino

Visual Studio 2015 Community is a one-stop tool by Microsoft for most things and you can use the same tool for working with Arduino/Intel line of IOT boards. However, a default installation of VS 2015 Community does not support these boardss. You need to install an extension available online as shown here:

Launch Visual Studio 2015 and click on Tools | Extensions and Updates...

In the search box for items online, type Arduino and Click search. Arduino IDE for Visual Studio get displayed in the results pane as shown.

Click Download and the program starts downloading the VSIX (5.55.MB) installer.

It is now ready to install but accept the license terms and click Install.

It takes a little while to install and after it is installed you get the following message. You need to restart for changes to take effect,

Restart VS 2015 Community and there are items in Menu, Tools and Project where you can see that the installation has been effective.

vMicro menu item:

New | Arduino Project

Tools | Visual Micro

Now that you have installed the extension you can work with Arduino projects importing the Arduino 'Sketches' or creating from scratch.

Monday, May 11, 2015

Internet of Things, Arduino and Visual Studio

Arduino has become very popular among IOT enthusiasts of all types and stripes and because of
relatively low cost you need only to invest modestly to turn your imagination into reality.
Most probably you already know about Arduino and if you have not heard of Arduino here is a link
for you to start (http://www.arduino.cc/) with.

There are a number of videos about Arduino at the above site. Simply put, Arduino is an electronics platform (the platform you can use to build interactive projects with both Open source software and
hardware).

Here is the circuitry of Arduino Uno R3 which I bought from Amazon. Besides this there are many other boards that help you to work with your projects. It is better to buy a kit otherwise you will have to go and buy other compatible components.

Arduino has its own software (c/c++ programming language) that helps you to run Arduino programs called 'Sketches'. Arduino software which is presently in version 1.6.4 provides the Integrated Development Interface (IDE) to help writing programs. Programs can run on Windows, OS X and Linux. This software program can be used with any Arduino board such as the one shown above.

While Arduino IDE can be used to write programs to the boards and 'run' them, Microsoft Visual
Studio can also be used and in order to use Visual Studio you also need to install a program
called Visual Micro from this site (http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software).

Besides Arduino there are others, Banana PI, Raspberry PI, Intel XDK hardwares (Intel® Galileo and Intel® Edison boards, shields, sensors, actuators) etc..

Visual Micro is a plug-in which provides the Arduino programming environment. While Arduino IDE does not have a debugger, Visual Studio has built-in debuggng support.

Arduino is not supported on Visual Studio 2015 and the ideal version to use at this time is the
Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition (a free download), although versions 2008 to 2013 are supported.

Visual Studio Community edition is described in details here:
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2014/11/you-get-all-this-for-free-in-visual.html

Install Visual Studio (edition of your choice from those supported) before you install Visual Micro.

Here are a few screen shots from my Visual Micro installation.
Stable version of Visual Micro from here: