RedBoard Turbo Hookup Guide

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Contributors: Alex the Giant
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Setting Up Arduino

While the SAMD21 alone is powerful enough, what truly makes it special is its growing support in the Arduino IDE. With just a couple click's, copies, and pastes, you can add ARM Cortex-M0+-support to your Arduino IDE. This page will list every step required for getting RedBoard Turbo support into your Arduino IDE.

Update Arduino! This setup requires at least Arduino version 1.6.4 or later. We've tested it on 1.6.5 and the latest version – 1.8.8.

If you're running an older version of Arduino, consider visiting arduino.cc to get the latest, greatest release.

Install Arduino SAMD Board Add-Ons

First, you'll need to install a variety of tools, including low-level ARM Cortex libraries full of generic code, arm-gcc to compile your code, and bossa to upload over the bootloader. These tools come packaged along with Arduino's SAMD board definitions for the Arduino Zero.

To install the Arduino SAMD board definitions, navigate to your board manager (Tools > Board > Boards Manager...), then find an entry for Arduino SAMD Boards (32-bits ARM Cortex-M0+). Select it, and install the latest version (recently updated to v1.6.19).

Installing the Arduino SAMD boards

Downloading and installing the tools may take a couple minutes -- arm-gcc in particular will take the longest, it's about 250MB unpacked.

Once installed, Arduino-blue "Installed" text should appear next to the SAMD boards list entry.

Install SparkFun Board Add-On

Now that your ARM tools are installed, one last bit of setup is required to add support for the SparkFun SAMD boards. First, open your Arduino preferences (File > Preferences). Then find the Additional Board Manager URLs text box, and paste the below link in:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sparkfun/Arduino_Boards/master/IDE_Board_Manager/package_sparkfun_index.json

Arduino IDE Preferences Additional Moard Manager URLs

Then hit "OK", and travel back to the Board Manager menu. You should (but probably won't) be able to find a new entry for SparkFun SAMD Boards. If you don't see it, close the board manager and open it again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Installing the SparkFun SAMD Boards

This installation should be much faster; you've already done the heavy lifting in the previous section.

Select the Board and Serial Port

Once the board is installed, you should see a new entry in your Tools > Board list. Select your SparkFun RedBoard Turbo.

RedBoard Turbo board menu entry

Finally, select your Turbo's port. Navigate back up to the Tool > Port menu. The port menu may magically know which of your ports (if you have more than one) is the RedBoard Turbo board. On a Windows machine, the serial port should come in the form of "COM#". On a Mac or Linux machine, the port will look like "/dev/cu.usbmodem####".

Selecting the RedBoard Turbo port

Once you find it, select it!