Command line Arduino compiling and uploading?

Question

How do I compile and upload Arduino sketches from the command line on Mac and Linux? I\'ve installed the Arduino programming environment. Are there some sample makefiles an

Answer 1

You need to actually create a viable cpp file out of your arduino sketch. The arduino environment does that for you automatically. One trick to get to those files is to open your arduino preferences.txt (it's in ~/Library/Arduino on the mac, I think in your Documents and Settings or Application Data on windows, don't remember exactly), and set build.verbose=true and upload.verbose=true. Start arduino, and compile your sketch (don't upload it). The console at the bottom will show you which files were compiled. You can now go to that directory, which will contain the cpp file, and compiled object files for all the core arduino objects. You can copy those into your project and use the cpp file to do further hacking. Let me know if you need more information about the Makefile, I can provide you with those I have.

Answer 2

This is my boilerplate gnu make include for AVR projects, you may need to adapt some of it to fit your environment. It creates dependencies, has a host of standard gcc options I find useful or that optimize for size, as well as a library dir I use. I used this successfully to compile arduino software, I also previously hacked the PdePreprocessor in the arduino editor to be run from the command line to generate all the voodoo:

https://github.com/wesen/mididuino/blob/master/app/src/processing/app/preproc/PdePreprocessor.java

#
# generic AVR makefile
#
# (c)  July 2011 - Manuel Odendahl - wesen@ruinwesen.com
#

# include this into your main Makefile, after having defined TARGET and TARGET_OBJS

all: $(TARGET).hex

CURDIR := $(dir $(lastword $(MAKEFILE_LIST)))
include $(CURDIR)MidiCtrl.mk

CC             = avr-gcc
CXX            = avr-g++
OBJCOPY        = avr-objcopy
AVR_ARCH       ?= atmega64
LDAVR_ARCH     ?= avrmega64
FLASH_PROTOCOL = jtag2

CFLAGS   += -Os -ffunction-sections -DAVR -I. -mmcu=$(AVR_ARCH) -mcall-prologues -fshort-enums -fpack-struct -Wall -Werror
CFLAGS   += -Wall -DLITTLE_ENDIAN -g -flto

CFLAGS += no-tree-loop-optimize -ffreestanding -morder1 -funsigned-char -funsigned-bitfields -fshort-enums -fpack-struct
CFLAGS += -fdata-sections -fno-split-wide-types -fno-inline-small-functions -mcall-prologues

CLDFLAGS += -Wl,--relax,--gc-sections -ffunction-sections
CLDFLAGS += -mmcu=$(AVR_ARCH)
LDFLAGS  = -m $(LDAVR_ARCH) -M

# generate list
# CFLAGS += -Wa,-adhlns=$@.lst

%.o: %.cpp
        $(CXX) $(CXXFLAGS) -c $< -o $@

%.o: %.c
        $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -c $< -o $@

%.o: %.s
        $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -c $< -o $@

%.s: %.c
        $(CC) -S $(CFLAGS) -fverbose-asm $< -o $@

%.o: %.S
        $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -c $< -o $@

%.syx: %.hex
        ihex2sysex $< $@

%.srec: %.elf
        $(OBJCOPY) -j .text -j .data -O srec $< $@

%.hex: %.elf
        $(OBJCOPY) -j .text -j .data -O ihex $< $@

%.ee_srec: %.elf
        $(OBJCOPY) -j .eeprom --change-section-lma .eeprom=0 -O srec $< $@

AVR_BASE_DIR  ?= $(abspath $(CURDIR)..)
AVR_LIB_DIR   ?= $(AVR_BASE_DIR)/hardware/libraries

AVR_LIBS       += CommonTools Midi
AVR_LIB_DIRS   += $(foreach lib,$(AVR_LIBS),$(AVR_LIB_DIR)/$(lib))
AVR_INC_FLAGS  += $(foreach dir,$(AVR_LIB_DIRS),-I$(dir))
AVR_OBJS       += $(foreach dir,$(AVR_LIB_DIRS),$(foreach file,$(wildcard $(dir)/*.cpp),$(subst .cpp,.o,$(file))))
AVR_OBJS       += $(foreach dir,$(AVR_LIB_DIRS),$(foreach file,$(filter-out $(AVR_HOST_EXCLUDE),$(wildcard $(dir)/*.c)),$(subst .c,.o,$(file))))
AVR_DEPS       += $(subst .o,.d,$(AVR_OBJS))

# AVR_HOST_EXCLUDE can be used to exclude specific files later on

CXXFLAGS += $(AVR_INC_FLAGS)
CFLAGS += $(AVR_INC_FLAGS)

CXXFlags += -Werror -Wall
CFLAGS += -Werror -Wall

default: all

%.d:%.c
        set -e; $(CC) -MM $(CFLAGS) $< \
        | sed 's,\($*\)\.o[ :]*,\1.o $@ : ,g' > $@ ; \
        [ -s $@ ] || rm -f $@

%.d:%.cpp
        set -e; $(CXX) -MM $(CXXFLAGS) $< \
        | sed 's,\($*\)\.o[ :]*,\1.o $@ : ,g' > $@ ; \
        [ -s $@ ] || rm -f $@

%.host.d:%.c
        set -e; $(CC) -MM $(CFLAGS) $< \
        | sed 's,\($*\)\.o[ :]*,\1.o $@ : ,g' > $@ ; \
        [ -s $@ ] || rm -f $@

%.host.d:%.cpp
        set -e; $(CXX) -MM $(CXXFLAGS) $< \
        | sed 's,\($*\)\.o[ :]*,\1.o $@ : ,g' > $@ ; \
        [ -s $@ ] || rm -f $@

printlibs:
        echo $(AVR_LIBS)

$(TARGET).elf: $(TARGET).o $(TARGET_OBJS) $(AVR_OBJS)
        $(CXX) $(CLDFLAGS) -g -o $@ $^

_clean:
        - rm *.elf *.hex *.o .midictrl.flags

libclean:
        rm -rf $(TARGET_OBJS) $(OBJS)

# concrete settings for development environment

UNAME=$(shell uname)
ISWIN=$(findstring CYGWIN,$(UNAME))
ISMAC=$(findstring Darwin,$(UNAME))

CC = avr-gcc
CXX = avr-g++
OBJCOPY = avr-objcopy
AVR_ARCH = atmega64
F_CPU = 16000000L
CORE = minicommand2

Answer 3

Compiling and uploading sketches (as apposed to C/C++ sources) on the command line (on Windows, Mac, and Linux) is supported directly via flags to the arduino executable since 1.5.0.

An ino can be compiled and uploaded with arduino --upload [sketch.ino]

Documentation

Answer 4

You can use biicode (it's a project I'm working in) which is based on CMake (but you don't actually need to write any cmake file) and is also a tool to manage Arduino libraries

It's main features are:

• Dependencies resolution, transitively, as maven does, but without config files: reads dependencies directly from source code.
• Central repository, anyone can upload their libraries. They can be explored, navigated and discovered in the web
• Version control: it checks versions compatibility and allows safe updates of dependencies
• You can use it with any text editor (it has optional eclipse integration)
• It manages project setup and compilations, flashes generated firmware to the board

You can see a quick demo here and read more in the documentation.

Answer 5

Official CLI tool

The arduino team is developing a cli client https://github.com/arduino/arduino-cli

Announcement: https://blog.arduino.cc/2018/08/24/announcing-the-arduino-command-line-interface-cli/

You can do almost everything with this, from downloading boards and libraries, to compile and upload scripts. What's missing is the monitoring part.

To monitor in linux you can still use the commands stty to configure port and cat to read it.

stty -F /dev/ttyACM0 38400 # <-- Baud rate. The number in Serial.begin()
cat /dev/ttyACM0 # <-- Port

You can find the port with arduino-cli

arduino-cli board list

---

Full instructions in the Github repo and the man page:

    $ arduino-cli Arduino Command Line Interface (arduino-cli).

    Usage:   arduino-cli [command]

    Examples: arduino <command> [flags...]

    Available Commands:
      board         Arduino board commands.
      compile       Compiles Arduino sketches.
      config        Arduino Configuration Commands.
      core          Arduino Core operations.
      help          Help about any command
      lib           Arduino commands about libraries.
      sketch        Arduino CLI Sketch Commands.
      upload        Upload Arduino sketches.
      version       Shows version number of Arduino CLI.