[Shred]

Is anyone else running the Arduino IDE as a portable application?

As someone who maintains a few older Arduino projects, plus does quite a bit of ESP8266 development using the Arduino IDE, I found myself descending into a hell of conflicting libraries and juggling different versions of the Arduino IDE on different computers.  It was all getting very confusing and difficult to maintain.

I'm now running a separate installation of the Arduino IDE as a portable application - dedicated to the WeatherDuino firmware.  It's great, since none of the libraries change unless they come with a new release of the WD software.  If I want to move it to a different computer, I can just copy the file structure across and I'm up and running.

If anyone is interested in trying this, the basic process is:

• Download the .zip version of the Arduino installer
  
• Unpack to a suitable location
  
• Create a directory named "portable" in the same directory as arduino.exe
  
• On first launch, the following directories will be created:
  

Code:

.\portable\sketchbook .\portable\sketchbook\libraries

Use the above directories for the WeatherDuino source code.

The official documentation is here: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/PortableIDE