Arduino Cloud IDE

The Arduino Cloud IDE (previously known as Arduino Create) is a cloud based development environment for Arduino which can be used with any modern internet browser. Very simply, you can login from anywhere in the world to a fully functional Arduino IDE which stores your code in the cloud. This is particularly useful if you’re on a Chromebook or you use several different computers and you want to have the same setup everywhere. In an emergency, you can borrow somebody else’s computer and find all your files and libraries there. A special feature of the Cloud IDE is that the Arduino sketch folder can also accommodate schematic diagrams and layout diagrams. You just need to place a schematic.png and layout.png image in the folder and they will show up as tabs in your IDE. Easy! Another interesting advantage of the Cloud IDE is that every single Arduino library known to us (a few thousands!) are pre-installed so you don’t have to spend time looking for libraries and installing them. Just include them; they are there already. To get started you just need to go to https://cloud.arduino.cc and you’ll be asked to login or create an Arduino account. Once you’re in, you’ll see this screen where you can find your sketchbook and everything else you need.

If you use the new Arduino IDE 2.0 you can synchronise the sketchbook you see on the cloud with the one on your computer (more or less similar to what happens with Dropbox and similar services) If it’s the first time you’ve used the Cloud IDE, you’ll be asked to install a very small program, the Arduino Create Agent, which allows your browser to communicate with serial ports so that you can upload your sketches on actual boards.

If you’re using certain types of boards like the MKRs, Nano 33 IoT and similar, you can include a feature called OTA (Over the Air updates) which will allow you to upload new code to the board over an internet connection. Pretty neat eh? Providing a full and detailed description of how the Cloud IDE works is beyond the scope of this introductory book.