The IDE seems to have an out-of-date ARM Toolchain library

Development Tools IDE 2.x
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I'm using IDE version: 2.0.0-rc5, date: 2022-03-10T11:09:10.332Z, CLI Version: 0.21.0 [10107d24] to program an Adafruit PyGamer. It looks like the library folder for the ARM Toolchain is: C:\Users\EagleAglow\AppData\Local\Arduino15\staging\packages

In that folder there are two Toolchain library zip files: "gcc-arm-none-eabi-7-2017-q4-major-win32-arduino1.zip" and "gcc-arm-none-eabi-9-2019-q4-major-win32.zip"

I have found a later version of the toolchain at: Arm GNU Toolchain | 10-2020-q4-major – Arm Developer

How can I use that file? What folder should it placed in? What other changes should I make?

Should this newer library be part of the IDE install?

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Hi @eagleaglow

The most important thing to understand is that the IDE doesn't have any toolchains. It is only a general purpose tool for developing Arduino sketches. The Arduino build system is a very flexible framework that allows the creators of boards platforms to install any arbitrary versions of any arbitrary toolchains needed for their target hardware, and use those toolchains in any way they want.

In the case of your Adafruit PyGamer, this is the "Adafruit SAMD (32-bits ARM Cortex-M0+ and Cortex-M4) Boards" platform, which is developed and maintained by Adafruit, not Arduino.

In addition to hundreds of 3rd party Arduino boards platforms, Arduino has created 5 or 6 of their own, but these are completely separate projects.

You can learn all about the subject here:

https://arduino.github.io/arduino-cli/latest/platform-specification/

This is the folder where the Arduino IDE stages the downloaded toolchain archives before installing them. Once the installation process is finished, the files under that folder are never again used by the Arduino IDE. They are never cleared out by the Arduino IDE, so the presence of a given version there only indicates that it was installed at one time, and not necessarily that it is currently in use.

The toolchains currently in use are under the C:\Users\EagleAglow\AppData\Local\Arduino15\packages folder.

Why do you want to use it?

Unless you have some specific reason for needing the new compiler version, you might be better off to leave the boards platform maintenance to Adafruit and get straight to having fun with your PyGamer.

If you are set on it, just study the information at the Arduino Platform Specification link I shared above and you will get it sorted out eventually.

No. As I explained this is completely independent of the Arduino IDE installation. It would be many gigabytes if Arduino bundled every possible toolchain. Much better to install the toolchains as needed for the specific boards each user happens to have.

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Thank you for the detailed reply - I'll read through those links.

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