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ArduinoCore-API

This repository hosts the hardware independent layer of Arduino core. In other words it contains the abstract definition of the Arduino core API, consisting of hardware-independent header files that are then included and implemented by the various platform-specific cores.

Having a single place where the Arduino API is defined means that there is no longer a String implementation within every Arduino core (a String module within ArduinoCore-avr, a String module within ArduinoCore-samd, a String module within ArduinoCore-megaavr …) but rather one String implementation within ArduinoCore-API which all other cores utilise. This has the pleasant side effects that bugs fixed or features added within the ArduinoCore-API String implementation are automatically propagated to all cores utilizing ArduinoCore-API.

As of now, the following official cores are utilising ArduinoCore-API:

There's an ongoing effort to port the others, while maintainers of third-party cores are strongly invited to follow the same route in order to stay up-to-date with the new language features. For backwards compatibility, every revision of this repo will increase the ARDUINO_API_VERSION define.

Documentation

The Arduino API is documented in the official language reference, whose sources are located in this repository and are open to contributions from the community.

Support

This repository is not directly usable by final users. If you need assistance with Arduino, see the Help Center and browse the forum.

Development

Bugs & Issues

If you want to report an issue with this core, you can submit it to the issue tracker of this repository. Some rules apply:

If your issue is about a specific hardware platform, report it to its repository. This one is only about discussing the generic API.
Before posting, please check if the same problem has been already reported by someone else to avoid duplicates.
Remember to include as much detail as you can about your hardware set-up, code and steps for reproducing the issue. Make sure you're using an original Arduino board.

Contributions

Contributions are always welcome! You can submit them directly to this repository as Pull Requests. Please provide a detailed description of the problem you're trying to solve. We also appreciate any help in testing issues and patches contributed by other users.

Unit testing

This repository includes a test suite that covers most of the API and that is designed to run on generic hardware, thus not requiring a development board. We call this host-based unit-testing. In order to test the features that are only defined but not implemented in this repository, mock implementations are included.

Please help us improve the coverage of the test suite!

To build and run unit tests

The unit tests are automatically built by GitHub as part of pull request checks (in .github/workflows/unit-tests.yml).

To build and run locally:

Dependencies

CMake
GCC

On (Ubuntu) Linux run:

sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake

From the project root:

cd test && mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make && bin/test-ArduinoCore-API

Implementing ArduinoCore-API

In order to compile a core which is implementing ArduinoCore-API you'll need to copy/symlink the api directory to the target's cores/arduino directory as part of your development and release workflow. The most elegant and effective solution is to develop your core with api symlinked and produce the distributable archive by telling tar to follow symlinks. Example:

tar --exclude='*.git*' -cjhvf $yourcore-$version.tar.bz2 $yourcore/

The API is coded to the C++11 standard and the core's compiler must be able to support that version of the language.

Documentation for how to integrate with a Arduino core (which is necessary if you do not download the Arduino core via the Boards Manager) can be found here:

Donations

This open source code is maintained by Arduino with the help of the community. We invest a considerable amount of time in testing code, optimizing it and introducing new features. Please consider donating or sponsoring to support our work, as well as buying original Arduino boards which is the best way to make sure our effort can continue in the long term.

License and credits

This code is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL 2.1. If you have questions about licensing please contact us at license@arduino.cc.