Extending the Arduino IDE: is there a plugin mechanism available?

[Cristian Spiescu]

Hello,

I would like to build an integration between the Arduino IDE and Flowerino (which generates Arduino code from diagrams).
Is there a way to build a plugin, that would be loaded by the IDE? This plugin would a) contribute with menu entries that open new screens and b) do some basic communication with the IDE (get the path of the current project, reload files, etc.).

If not, my idea would be create a new project (that would have one or more jars). And then to have a new start script, that a) uses the original classpath of the IDE; b) adds the new jars to the classpath and c) starts a new main(), that delegates to the original main(), and then navigates the objects in order to enrich the menu, etc.

Do you have any ideas?

Thank you in advance.
Best regards,
Cristian.

[Ivan Grokhotkov]

Hi Cristian,

There is a plugin mechanism inherited from Processing.

For example, here is a plugin written to simplify file uploads to the embedded file system in ESP8266 core: https://github.com/igrr/Arduino-legacy/tree/esp8266/build/shared/tools/ESP8266FS/src

For each plugin IDE will add an entry to Arduino Tools menu. I don't know if it is possible to add multiple entries from a single plugin.

You can also communicate with IDE classes, take a look at the source code linked above for an example.

These plugins have to be installed into Documents/Arduino/tools directory. Unfortunately it's not possible to distribute them using boards manager (but that would be an improvement).

Regards,

Ivan

[Cristian Spiescu]

Thank you Ivan.

I have tried it and it works great. In the .init() method, I grab the Editor object, and I populate its menu bar with a top level menu entry (i.e. I achieve what I was looking for).

Regards,
Cristian.

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