Many have noticed, but in case you didn't, here's a rundown on our new approach to writing software support for click boards™. In short, it's not just examples, it's complete libraries.
A time lapse of life in MikroE would reveal a constant shuffling of staff within the building. Employees disappear from one office and respawn in another. We are growing fast, and in the process, like cell division, some people split off from their original departments and new teams get formed.
The newly formed Web department we recently wrote about is one such case. The other is our Firmware department, with Richard Lowe — whom some of you know from Libstock — and his team of young engineers previously from the Support department and Intern's Lab.
Here's how Richard describes the role of his team:
Drivers and firmware libraries are somewhat at the core of issues that embedded developers face today. Either they do or don't work on a particular platform, they use too many resources, or they are written in a style that is completely different than what is your standard. They all have some type of immediate gratification problem.
We have taken this challenge to heart and have revisited a once forgotten path of writing libraries that can be easily installed and used by our IDE and compilers. You may have noticed a new style of packages for the most recent click boards on Libstock. They contain a .mpkg file that can be used with our free package manager to install the library into your IDE.
The package contains the library, documentation, and example that can be easily accessed by the library manager pane in the IDE. Once installed, these libraries are just as easy to use as any of our other offerings like the USB, Networking, FAT32, or Wireless libraries.
As always, if you encounter difficulties, our support staff stands at the ready to assist.
Download a package for some recent click board, for example, Fan click, to see how it works. Once you download it, install the package using Package Manager.
Launch your compiler, and there it is, tucked in the lower right corner of your screen inside the Library Manager — your latest click board library, with all its functions.
If you're not sure where to start, just click on the library to open the comprehensive Help File.
With this kind of support, developing hardware with click boards will become so convenient it will almost feel like cheating. It's like getting a second life when you consider how many coding hours you'll save. As the number of click boards continues to grow, it'll only get better and better. We recommend that you try it as soon as possible.
Yours sincerely,
MikroElektronika