first things first to relieve some of the frustration
i've managed to connect to the device once. can you assist on two points:
(1)
i've seen some discussion about turning off autorun so that that will stop messing up the connection when i press reset et c., but i cannot find instructions to turn off autorun that works with my xp install. that would be great!
(2)
it takes a couple minutes to compile "blink" when i hit upload. are there any secrets to reducing this time (eg. even turn off compile because the program is the same, the upload failed) and thus being less frustrated??
I've never heard of anything like that. Post a link to this discussion. Please use the chain links icon on the toolbar to make the link clickable.
Usually a ridiculously slow compilation is caused by your antivirus settings. During compilation the Arduino IDE starts a huge number of processes. Some antiviruses will block each until they have been scanned. To see if this is the case, disable your antivirus for a single compilation, then turn it back on immediately after. If the compilation speed is faster then you know the antivirus is the culprit and you will need to configure it to whitelist the processes, files, or folders the Arduino IDE uses during the compilation. When comparing compile times you should note that the Arduino IDE caches compiled files so the initial compilation will be slower than subsequent compilations. So don't let that skew your observations. The cache is cleared when you switch boards on the Tools > Board menu or if any of the cached files has been modified since they were cached.
ty i'm not running any AV, my system is a basic XP install with most extraneous processes turned off for audio performance. i'm still using borland's freecommandlinetools compiler from 20 odd years ago, best compiler ever.
that helps to know and gives me something to search for, i'd seen videos of other people with very fast compiles, so now i know its not just some setting i'm not familiar with yet.
The IDE versions 1.6.6 and newer are a lot slower to compile than 1.6.5 and older. More recent IDE versions have gotten a little better by caching but it's still nowhere near what it used to be. It's always shocking to me when I go back to an old IDE version to do a test or help someone and I'm sitting there waiting and waiting for the compile to finish only to realize that it finished immediately and I just didn't notice. The slowdown was accompanied with some significant improvements in function prototype generation and dependency resolution but the hope was always that the causes of the slowdown would resolved after the initial release of the new compilation system. 2.5 years later it's starting to look less likely that's going to happen.
silly thing its obvious i suppose, go to preferences and deselect that "aggressively cache compiled core" option, reduced about a 2 minute wait to maybe 8 seconds. much more manageable
getting the performance i want out of my board as well! quite glad.
Interesting. I'd expect that to only cause a slow compilation on the first compile, then faster compilations on subsequent compiles until you change the board or edit a core file. I'll have to do some tests on my machine to see whether that setting is actually helpful. Well I'm glad you found a solution. That must be quite a relief! Compiling for AVR boards is reasonably fast on my computer but compiling for the ESP8266 is painfully slow and that makes the development process really drag. I end up trying to multitask while waiting for the compilation to finish and then getting distracted and losing track of exactly what I was doing in my programming project.
came back to say exactly that, teh first compile+upload is slow (almost 2 minutes), so anyone benching the setting shouldn't despair after just one.
i usually don't make it through that many uploads before some kind of com error (eg. loses port, gets stuck in upload) occurs, but they are generally easy to remedy. does make a crucial difference to teh dev experience. multitasking.. i recommend the traditional compile procedure.. pack a bowl and wait it out
