Arduino and mbed Libraries

Core libraries that we release regularly

There are several core libraries that we keep in lock step in terms of compatibility and board support. These libraries are:

• TaskManagerIO provides core event and task scheduling services to Arduino sketches.
• IoAbstraction provides user input, EEPROM and IO helper classes.
• tcMenu a fully fledged embedded menu framework with a designer UI and IoT capabilities
• SimpleCollections a simple binary searchable list and a thread/interrupt safe circular buffer that work on a very wide range of boards.
• LiquidCrystalIO a task manager friendly fork of the Arduino LCD library that works over many IO devices.

The above libraries support a wide range of hardware, including nearly every official Arduino board, most ESP boards, along with many mbed version 5 and 6 boards with or without an RTOS. We test with everything from Uno to ESP32 and large STM32F4 boards.

What boards do our libraries support?

Processor	Platform	Libraries	Locking	DAC	Developer boards we test with
AVR	Arduino	Fully tested	Atomic	No	Uno - some features limited
AVR	Arduino	Fully tested	Atomic	No	MEGA 2560, WifiR2
SAMD	Arduino	Fully tested	Atomic	Yes	MKR1300
SAMD	Seeed Arduino	Fully tested	Atomic	Yes	MG126 board
nrf52840	Arduino(mbed)	Fully tested	CAS	Yes	Nano 33 BLE devices
RPI Pico	Arduino(mbed)	Fully tested	CAS	No	Raspberry PI pico, TFT, encoder
RPI Pico	Arduino(EarlePH)	Fully tested	CAS	No	Raspberry PI pico, TFT, encoder
ESP8266	Arduino	Fully tested	Atomic	No	Node MCU, Heltek Wifi 8
ESP32	Arduino	Fully tested	CAS	Yes	Wifi32, AZ Dev Kit
ESP32S2	Arduino	Fully tested	CAS	Yes	ESP32S2 Saloma
ESP32S3	Arduino	Fully tested	CAS	No	ESP32S3 Tiny
STM32F4	Stm32Duino	Fully tested	Hybrid	Yes	Nucleo STM32F4x9ZI OLED
STM32F4	mbed	Fully tested	CAS	Yes	Nucleo/Disc1 STM32F4x9ZI LTDC/OLED
Particle	Photon	User tested	Atomic	No	Unknown, user tested
SAM	Arduino	Compilation	Atomic	Yes	Arduino Due compile test only

Although we only test on some Arduino mbed boards, it should work on nearly all that we know of, you can take a look at the list of mbed boards we check for here, if another springs to light that we haven’t added please try adding it to that define statement, and if it works let us know.

• For both mbed direct and Arduino that’s based on mbed we rely on mbed inbuilt CAS locking. We’ve tested on a few different Arduino mbed and direct mbed boards.
• For ESP32 we use the underlying CAS capabilities to ensure cross core locking
• On ESP boards we call yield more often within the run loop to prevent watchdog resets.
• On Raspberry PI pico earlephilhower core, circular buffers and task manager use a critical section to synchronize data.
• On STM32Duino at the moment we are transitioning from using Arduino Atomic functions to using direct LDREX/STREX calls. Completed for CircularBuffer but not TaskManager.

How does platform determination work

Most of our libraries support adding a file locally in the root of your source called zio_local_definitions.h, once added this will be included by the platform determination before doing anything else. This allows two ways of setting build level flags, firstly by providing them in the build options, secondly within this file. This means that you can easily define build options when using Arduino 1.x IDE.

In TaskManagerIO

Whenever you include TaskManagerIO.h this pulls in TaskPlatformDeps.h to work out what platform you’re building for, and to create suitable thread safety and CAS or Atomic based locking constructs for that platform. Again the thread safety is so that you can put events into task manager from any thread, or trigger events from interrupts. You should only ever call runLoop from a single thread, usually for the default taskManager instance that would be the loop() method on Arduino, or main() on mbed.

In IoAbstraction

Whenever you include IoAbstraction.h or include PlatformDetermination.h directly, then IoAbstraction need to work out how to provide all input output features that it supports. This allows the rest of IoAbstraction not to concern itself with platform differences. This goes right down to GPIO, the way I2C works, and even analog IO support. For ESP32 we provide analog input and output using IDF functions, allowing the analog support on ESP32 to support the inbuilt DAC, ADC and PWM (using LEDC).

In SimpleCollections

Simple collections circular buffer is thread and interrupt safe, this is achieved by checking the board type we have compiled to providing a suitable atomic compare and update facility for that platform. On mbed it uses mbed atomic, on STM32Duino F4 it uses LDREX, on ESP32 it uses the RTOS contructs. On other boards it uses standard Arduino atomic functions. It should be safe on all the boards listed in the supported section, and probably more besides.

Java UIs and frameworks

In addition to this the Java UI framework which is heavily based on JavaFX is used for the designer, embedCONTROL UI and embedded java apps is tested on a wide range of hardware, we suggest using the excellent Liberica JDK as it has JavaFX built in, and a 32bit build for Raspberry PI available.

Platform	Designer	embedCONTROL	Java Embedded	JDK Used
Windows 10/11	Fully tested	Fully tested	Fully tested	Liberica
MacOS	Fully tested	Fully tested	Fully tested	Liberica
Ubuntu desktop	Fully tested	Fully tested	Fully tested	Liberica
Raspberry PI	Fully tested	Fully tested	Fully tested	Liberica

JavaScript embedCONTROL.JS

The webserver version of embedCONTROL is built in TypeScript, we target most modern browsers and test with desktop and mobile version of both Chrome and Safari. The generated website is highly standards compliant, based on React.JS, and therefore should work with a very wide range of browsers.

Are there differences between platforms

We have tried as hard as we can to avoid any user-level differences in core features between platforms. It should work close to identically on all platforms that we support. There are obviously a few extra features on some platforms that are available to use, but when using these it should be pretty clear they platform specific.