Arduino Cloud's New Custom Templates Aim to Get Your Projects Up and Running Fast
Building on the earlier addition of official project templates, Arduino Cloud now lets you make — and share — your own.
Arduino has announced a new feature for its cloud platform, which aims to get users starting new projects with less fuss — by allowing them to create and clone custom project templates.
"Whether you are an IoT enthusiast, an enterprise developer or a high school teacher, we all know the thrill of bringing a new IoT [Internet of Things] project to life," the Arduino team writes of the new feature. "But we also understand the frustration of repetitive setup processes and the time sink of configuring the same elements over and over again. What if you could save your project setup and reuse it at will?"
That, the team explains, is what the new Arduino Cloud custom templates feature offers. The templates take the form of a pre-configured project, similar to the company's existing template system — but where its former templates were unchanging monoliths selected by the company itself, the new templates can be anything you desire.
"This means," the Arduino team notes, "you can: design your own Thing abstractions, including custom sketches and variables; create personalized dashboards for interacting with your devices; save and reuse your favorite project setups; [and] share your templates within your workspace for Enterprise and School plans."
While the collaborative template-sharing functionality is exclusive to paying Enterprise and School tier users, at least for now, templates can be exported from the platform and shared as .tino files. Even for those working alone, the new feature should save time — allowing makers to create "boilerplate" projects that set everything up ready for the meat of a project in just a few clicks.
More information on the custom templates feature is available in the Arduino Cloud docs.