FAQ

Arduino Nano/Uno/Mega is not detected

When you run arduino-cli board list, your board doesn't show up. Possible causes:

• Your board is a cheaper derivative, or
• It's a board, such the classic Nano, that uses a USB to serial converter like FTDI FT232 or CH340. These chips always report the same USB VID/PID to the operating system, so the only thing we know is that the board mounts that specific USB2Serial chip, but we don’t know which board that chip is on.

What's the FQBN string?

For a deeper understanding of how FQBN works, you should understand the Arduino platform specification.

How to set multiple board options?

Additional board options have to be separated by commas (instead of colon):

$ arduino-cli compile --fqbn "esp8266:esp8266:generic:xtal=160,baud=57600" TestSketch

Where is the Serial Monitor?

This being a command line tool, we believe it's up to the user to choose their preferred way of interacting with the serial connection. If we were to integrate it into the CLI we'd end up putting a tool inside a tool, and this would be something that we're trying to avoid.

There are many excellent serial terminals to chose from. On Linux or macOS, you may already have screen installed. On Windows, a good choice for command line usage is Plink, included with PuTTY.

Arduino CLI does provide a gRPC interface which offers the capability for powerful integration with custom monitors. See the Monitor service documentation.

Additional assistance

If your question wasn't answered, feel free to ask on Arduino CLI's forum board.