SparkFun Arduino Pro Micro - freeIMU - IDE nightly build

Hi all.

I recently purchased 3x Sparkfun Arduino Pro Micro, 3x 9 DOF IMU mpu-9150 plus other various items.

During the past days I’ve been able to properly configure the Arduino IDE 1.0.5 , compile and upload some test sketches.

Everything worked fine and I’ve been able to read the IMU values for gyro, accel and compass and also read and write to the micro SD or read the barometer values.

In order to work with the Pro Micro I obviously downloaded and copied the Sparkfun addons to the documented /hardware/ folder and then selected the board from the IDE Tools menu.

Today, I’ve found a very updated implementation of the freeIMU library here: https://github.com/mjs513/FreeIMU-Updates

Trying to compile the “FreeIMU_serial.ino” sketch, I got thousands of errors of every kind that are probably due to the old IDE version.

So I downloaded the Arduino IDE nightly build and started it just from the unzipped folder.

I am now able to compile the sketch without errors but unfortunately… I cannot select the Sparkfun Pro Micro board to upload because it does not show up in the menu.

Is there a different way to manage the Sparkfun Pro Micro addon files when using a more recent Arduino IDE ?

At the moment I’m completely locked down because of this issue…

You need to move all related files to your new location… You can try to put the “hardware” folder under the Documents>arduino and see if the IDE will pick it up. I know it does for 3rd party libraries.

codlink:
You need to move all related files to your new location… You can try to put the “hardware” folder under the Documents>arduino and see if the IDE will pick it up. I know it does for 3rd party libraries.

Hi and thank you for your kind answer.

I just tried in the way you described but unfortunately the Sparkfun Micros don’t show up.

Thanks to words in your answer I tried googling again and found something interesting in the README.md on the Sparkfun github repository:

To add this support to your Arduino IDE, simply copy this folder into your hardware directory in one of two places:

  • the actual Arduino directory

  • inside your Sketchbook directory

  • Please note: This will only work under Arduino IDE versions 1.0.1 - 1.0.5

For version 1.5.2, please see the [Arduino repository]( https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/wiki … cification ) for more information on adding these files.

Keep in mind that version 1.5.2 is still currently a beta IDE.

The information at that url tells that the folder structure should be completely different with the new IDE and each vendor should have its own folder like the following:

hardware/arduino/avr/… - Arduino - AVR Boards

hardware/arduino/sam/… - Arduino - SAM (32bit ARM) Boards

hardware/yyyyy/avr/… - Yyy - AVR

hardware/xxxxx/avr/… - Xxx - AVR

and

Each architecture must be configured through a set of configuration files:

• platform.txt contains definitions for the CPU architecture used (compiler, build process parameters, tools used for upload, etc.)

• boards.txt contains definitions for the boards (board name, parameters for building and uploading sketches, etc.)

• programmers.txt contains definitions for external programmers (typically used to burn bootloaders or sketches on a blank CPU/board)

So I went back to the original folder situation in /documents/arduino/hardware/ and then created a /SparkFun/ folder and an /avr/ folder below that. I then copied the boards.txt file in this new /sparkfun/avr/ folder.

Now I can see and select the SparkFun Arduino Pro Micro !

At this point I tried to compile the Blink sample . the compile step starts but stops with an error:

\arduino-nightly\hardware\arduino\avr\cores\arduino/Arduino.h:245:26: fatal error: pins_arduino.h: No such file or directory

#include “pins_arduino.h”

^

compilation terminated.

I solved this copying also the /variants/ folder to /sparkfun/avr/.

Now there are some other errors both in \arduino-nightly\hardware\arduino\avr\cores\arduino\USBCore.cpp and in \arduino-nightly\hardware\arduino\avr\cores\arduino\Platform.h

I think this is due to the fact that I don’t have the platform.txt and programmers.txt files for the SparkFun Pro Micro.

After reading the rest of the page about the hw architecture config and being a newbie , I would hope :

a) that SparkFun guys will publish the addon files also for newer IDE version

b) that someone else already found this issue and can share the platform.txt and programmers.txt files

I understand 1.5.x is in beta, but the fact that I can compile this freeIMU version only with recent IDE and not with 1.0.5 … probably places things in a different perspective…

In the meantime I tried to contact mjs513 (the author of freeIMU-updates) to understand his dev environment setup. Hope to get in touch soon.

@codlink: thank you again for your help and kind regards,

Mario

Hi all.

Just FYI: I just got confirmation from the Arduino IDE developers:

“Yes, the plugin format changed from in the transition from IDE 1.0.x to IDE 1.5., please ask Sparkfun’s support or search in their website for a plugin that is compatible with the Arduino IDE 1.5.x.”

I will search again just to be sure but at the moment, I no longer need a recent IDE to work with the Sparkfun Pro Micro because I reverted to a different source code that I've reduced for my specific needs using v1.0.5 . It's now 24k of binaries uploaded to the Pro Micro (limit is 29K).

Anyway, I hope SparkFun will provide soon a new addon for this great micro…

Mario