Pierre Massat wrote:
> Now my question... Is the arduino software just really really bad?
Quite so, especially the serial port handling. The same applies for
Processing, upon which the arduino IDE is founded. You can hog a brand
new computer with a 9600bps transfer.
> It is randomly very slow at start-up, it randomly disables the serial
> port menu in Tools, it randomly decides to prevent me from uploading
> the program in the board, or warns me that serial port dev/ttyACM0 is
> already in use, or can't be found.
I have the exact same behavior with the Uno (on archlinux). I believe
it's mostly a matter of upgrading the bootloader that lies in the
atmega8U. That's why I stepped back to the golden age of no autoreset,
a trusty external ISP programmer, a good Makefile and a nice text editor.
It seems to occur more often when the program running on the board
writes to the serial port. It looks like the usb bridge and the main
microcontroller are not in the same stage.
Try holding the reset button, click upload and then release it. It
sometimes help.
> This is beginning to look more like witchcraft than computer science to me.
Bugs are computer science ;).
--
Charlot