Uninstall AVR Boards

Hello!

How can I uninstall "Arduino AVR Boards" package from Arduino IDE? I don't see this option in boards manager.

Arduino AVR Boards is bundled with the Arduino IDE so to uninstall it you will need to delete {Arduino IDE installation folder}/hardware/arduino and {Arduino IDE installation folder}/hardware/tools

Note that it's common for 3rd party hardware packages for AVR microcontrollers to reference components of Arduino AVR Boards so if you are using one of those hardware packages uninstalling Arduino AVR Boards will break the 3rd party hardware package.

Should the {Arduino IDE installation folder}/hardware folder be removed as well? It contains 3 files:

  • package_index_bundled.json
  • platform.keys.rewrite.txt
  • platform.txt

No, I wouldn't remove those. They are not AVR Boards specific.

How can I uninstall "Arduino AVR Boards" package from Arduino IDE?

Why would you want to do that?
If your "boards" menu is getting "cluttered", you can modify the boards.txt file to include "board.hide=true" entries, and those boards will be hidden. For example, I have an IDE with the SAMD boards installed, and it's boards.txt modified with:

tian_cons.hide=true
tian.hide=true
tian.hide=true
mkrfox1200.hide=true
mkrzero.hide=true
mkr1000.hide=true

(I started writing a little python program to help "manage" which boards are hidden, but it got "stalled" when I contemplated all the different path naming conventions :frowning: )

One thing to note, the actual definition of the hide property makes no difference. It's merely the presence of the property that causes the board to be hidden. So even if you do this:

uno.hide=false

the Arduino/Genuino Uno board will still be hidden from the Tools > Board menu. For this reason I think it is not best practices to use uno.hide=true as this gives the illusion that uno.hide=false will cause it to be unhidden. Instead I am just using an empty definition:

uno.hide=

It's really a shame that there are so many useful features like this that nobody knows about because Arduino didn't take the time to document them. This came up on the issue tracker and I vaguely remembered something about it but not the specific property name. So I had to spend a lot of time searching before I found this forum thread.

Hi,

Sorry to open this old post.

I only want to tell you that I developed an Arduino IDE plugin that allows you to select which boards do you want to see in the IDE. With this plugin you can hide all the boards that currently you not use.

If you want to try please check it out on Github:

Hope this helps you