Programming hundreds of Arduino Minions in one go

I am currently working on a neat project (Raspberry Pi CNC Board) where I have to program a bunch of Arduinos for each of the boards I am making. At first I did it with the Arduino IDE one board at a time but that was very tedious and required me to sometime change the Serial port number in the Arduino IDE.

Under the hood of the Arduino IDE it uses a compiler called GCC that builds and flashes the firmware to your Arduino boards. By switching on Verbose messages in the IDE one is able to see the exact commands the IDE is executing to get all of this done.

I used the commands from the IDE to automate my Minion programmer…

Steps involved:

• Use the Arduino IDE to create a firmware Hex file.(Verify your code in the IDE and check the Verbose messages for the location of the file)
• Check for newly plugged in Arduino’s and program them with the above Hex file. (Code -> Arduino Minion Programmer)

To start  programming, I take a bunch of USB cables and plug them into a USB hub. I run the script and then start plugging in the Arduino’s. As the script picks up new boards it will start programming them on the fly.

Now that I have all my minions under control, I am happy to say they are running the latest firmware.. 😉

Related articles across the web

• Building Arduino in the USA with Raspberry Pi
• Raspberry Pi CNC Board / Hat
• Windows 10 available now for Raspberry Pi 2
• How to Build a Raspberry Pi Jukebox Any Non-Geek Can Use