- IDE Design and Usability: better (automatic?) selection of serial port and board, an improved serial monitor, embedded links / images / circuits, sketch file extension, etc.
I'd like to 'vote' for a slightly more sophisticated serial monitor.
I do several simple projects with kids.
It would be nice to be able to do a tabular layout, rather than scroling like crazy, so we can easily see what we want to show.
An example is simple data monitoring, where we want to see, say, the minimum, maximum and most recent value. Scrolling is distracting and unnecessary.
I'd be happy with something like a very simple vt100, i.e.
- clear screen
- move to row, column (and then be able to print)
- clear current row to space
These could be 'magic' characters, but things like Serial.clearScreen(), Serial.cursorTo(), Serial.clearRow() would be okay.
It'd be helpful if '\r' did return to the start of the line (this is broken on my Mac). But I'd be okay with Serial.startOfLn(), or something.
This would reduce the need to write a processing program (which is beyond most of the kids I have in the few hours available), or resort to cutting and pasting into a file or spreadsheet, just to get a reasonable output printed.
HTH
GB-)