How to Program Your chipKIT Board in the Arduino IDE

For those of you with a chipKIT board, I have good news! If you like using the Arduino IDE, your dreams have become a reality with chipKIT-core (currently in beta). You can now program all of the chipKIT boards directly from within the Arduino IDE and the most-used libraries included with the chipKIT platform have already been updated to be compatible with the Arduino 1.6.x. If you’re interested in learning how to install chipKIT core, check out my Instructable that goes over how to manually install chipKIT-core yourself. If you’re using Arduino IDE version 1.6.7, you can use a super easy method to install and update chipKIT-core that I recently learned about that is not detailed in my Instructable.

If your version is 1.6.7, you can auto install via URL from within the Arduino IDE. This is the easiest method available! First, open the Arduino IDE and go to File->Preferences. A dialog box will show up and in the “Additional Boards Manager URLS:” you can add the URL: https://github.com/chipKIT32/chipKIT-core/raw/master/package_chipkit_index.json and then click OK to close the dialog box. Check out the picture below of the dialog box to make sure you have filled it out correctly.

Next go to Tools->Board->Board Manager in the Arduino IDE which will open a menu with all the packages you have. Scroll down to the chipKIT section and click on it. A button will appear that says install. When you click that, chipKIT-core will be installed. Once the install is finished, close the window and you will see that all of the chipKIT boards are available to select when you go to Tools->Boards!