SAM3S ported to Arduino IDE

[dougcl]

Hi folks, I have ported the sam3s to arduino ide, including usb.
https://github.com/dougcl/Arduino15x

Not sure how to get this onto the 1.6x ide. I would appreciate any help with that.

Thanks,
Doug

[Federico Fissore]

Great! You can now write a .json file to use to publish your core
through Boards Manager

See what other have done at
https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/wiki/Unofficial-list-of-3rd-party-boards-support-urls

Regards

Federico

[dougcl]

Thanks Federico, I wish that link (which I have visited many times already) gave me a better understanding. Maybe someone here can help.

1) To make modifications to the 1.6.x core, how do I relate the Arduino SAM core on Github https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/tree/master/hardware/arduino/sam/cores/ to my Arduino installation in C:\Program Files (x86)\Arduino\portable\packages\arduino\hardware\sam\1.6.4\cores?

Do I manually create a new version folder (say ...\sam\1.6.5) locally and then grab the files from Github and place them underneath this path? Is that the way it's done?

2) I'm not sure I have found a suitable, minimal JSON file that is appropriate for my SAM3S core, even after looking at the references here http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=321697.0. It's still pretty confusing.

3) Assuming I just wanted to create a JSON file for my 1.5.x core, what paths are expected in the ZIP?  Do I assume that the IDE will extract the zip into a subdirectory of C:\Program Files (x86)\Arduino\portable\packages\arduino\hardware\sam\variants and the IDE will find the core there?

4) Assuming that I want to first fork the Arduino code from Github, to be as current as possible with the latest, will my 1.6.x based core be presented by the board manager as a siloed copy, or can my core simply have only the changed files as overrides to Arduino managed code?

Thanks

[William Westfield]

On Aug 19, 2015, at 1:42 PM, dougcl <dou...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I wish that link (which I have visited many times already) gave me a better understanding. Maybe someone here can help.

You might want to look at the “release.sh” script and json “template” that I made for Optiboot (https://github.com/Optiboot/optiboot/tree/master/optiboot )

Since github allows “releases”, I took the strategy of creating a “release” file in the format that the IDE wants for installation, not necessarily matching the directory structure of the project itself. The script build a whole directory tree in the proper format, copies the right files to the right places, zips it all up and creates a json file that will point to it…

Optiboot is somewhat similar to your code, since it also tries to use the “standard” Arduino files for as much as possible (different files, of course!) And the script does not address the creation of a correct “boards.txt” file (which can be a bit of a pain in the neck.)

BillW/WestfW