Identifying your Arduino board from code

For my IoT project I needed to write code slightly differently for specific Arduino boards. E.g. for Arduino UNO I wanted to use Serial to talk to ESP8266 and for Arduino Mega wanted to use Serial1. So basically I wanted to use Board specific #defines

#ifdef MEGA
    #define SERIAL Serial1
#elif UNO
    #define SERIAL Serial
#endif

SERIAL.println("Something")

For that I needed to get board specific #defines for each of the board options in the Arduino IDE, so that as I change the board type in the IDE, I automatically build code for that specific board.

That information is actually available in a file called board.txt inside your arduino install folder. For me it is G:\arduino-1.6.5\arduino-1.6.5-r5\hardware\arduino\avr\boards.txt. For each board there is a section inside that file and the relevant entries look something as follows

##############################################################

uno.name=Arduino/Genuino Uno

uno.vid.0=0x2341
uno.pid.0=0x0043
uno.vid.1=0x2341
uno.pid.1=0x0001
...
uno.build.board=AVR_UNO
uno.build.core=arduino
uno.build.variant=standard

The .board entry when prefixed by ARDUINO_ becomes the #define. I wrote a quick PowerShell routine to get all such entires. The code for it is in GitHub at https://github.com/bonggeek/Samples/blob/master/Arduino/ListBoard.ps1

$f = Get-ChildItem -Path $args[0] -Filter "boards.txt" -Recurse
foreach($file in $f)
{
    Write-Host "For file" $file.FullName
    
    foreach ($l in get-content $file.FullName) {
        if($l.Contains(".name")) {
            $b = $l.Split('=')[1];
        }

        if($l.Contains(".board")) {
            $s = [string]::Format("{0,-40}ARDUINO_{1}", $b, ($l.Split('=')[1]));
            Write-Host $s
        }

    }
}

Given the argument of root folder or Arduino install, you get the following.

PS C:\Users\abhinaba> D:\SkyDrive\bin\ListBoard.ps1 G:\arduino-1.6.5\
For file G:\arduino-1.6.5\arduino-1.6.5-r5\hardware\arduino\avr\boards.txt
Arduino Yún                            ARDUINO_AVR_YUN
Arduino/Genuino Uno                     ARDUINO_AVR_UNO
Arduino Duemilanove or Diecimila        ARDUINO_AVR_DUEMILANOVE
Arduino Nano                            ARDUINO_AVR_NANO
Arduino/Genuino Mega or Mega 2560       ARDUINO_AVR_MEGA2560
Arduino Mega ADK                        ARDUINO_AVR_ADK
Arduino Leonardo                        ARDUINO_AVR_LEONARDO
Arduino/Genuino Micro                   ARDUINO_AVR_MICRO
Arduino Esplora                         ARDUINO_AVR_ESPLORA
Arduino Mini                            ARDUINO_AVR_MINI
Arduino Ethernet                        ARDUINO_AVR_ETHERNET
Arduino Fio                             ARDUINO_AVR_FIO
Arduino BT                              ARDUINO_AVR_BT
LilyPad Arduino USB                     ARDUINO_AVR_LILYPAD_USB
LilyPad Arduino                         ARDUINO_AVR_LILYPAD
Arduino Pro or Pro Mini                 ARDUINO_AVR_PRO
Arduino NG or older                     ARDUINO_AVR_NG
Arduino Robot Control                   ARDUINO_AVR_ROBOT_CONTROL
Arduino Robot Motor                     ARDUINO_AVR_ROBOT_MOTOR
Arduino Gemma                           ARDUINO_AVR_GEMMA

So now I can use

#ifdef  ARDUINO_AVR_MEGA2560
    // Serial 1: 19 (RX) 18 (TX);
    #define SERIAL Serial1
#elif ARDUINO_AVR_NANO
    #define SERIAL Serial
#endif // ARDUINO_MEGA