Arduino 12 released

Version 12 of the Arduino software IDE was released today along with a pretty lengthy list of updated features –

• Added Arduino Nano to the boards menu.
• Arduino Pro or Pro Mini (8 MHz) to the boards menu.
• Added Firmata library by Hans Steiner and others. This provides a standard protocol for communicating with software on the computer.
• Added an Ethernet library for use with the Arduino Ethernet Shield.
• Added a Servo library based on the work of Jim Studt.
• Added a LiquidCrystal library based on the work in the playground. It supports both 4- and 8-bit modes.
• Improved millis(): it now overflows after 49 days instead of 9 hours, but now uses slightly more processing power.
• Fixed reversing direction bug in Stepper library. (Thanks to Wayne Holder.)
• Moved insertion of #include to after any comments and #include statements in the main sketch file. This means that an #include now works.
• Upgraded to newer versions of avr-gcc (4.3.0) and avr-libc (1.6). This provides support for newer Atmel chips, but may increase the size of sketches.
• Allowing per-board specification of the upload.using preference, allowing upload via bootloader to some boards and via a programmer to others.
• Added return values to some functions in the Wire library to allow for better error handling.
• Fixed random() to work with long values.
• Creation of an abstract Print base-class to allow Serial, SoftwareSerial, and LiquidCrystal to share code for print() and println().
• Incorporated ladyada’s watchdog timer mods to the bootloader source, but only compiling them in for the Pro and Pro Mini (because they are included in the bootloader being burned on the boards by SparkFun).

– Release Notes & Download

Make: Arduino