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Motivation

Making sure the Arduino IDE was actually pointed at the right board was a confusing process for a lot of beginners, especially during the 1.x days of the software. You could manually compare the list of ports before and after plugging the board in, but badly-behaved Windows machines sometimes spat out a long list of dummy entries, making the hunt for the correct entry needlessly difficult.

Implementation

Rainmeter seemed like the easiest way to create an always-on widget for Windows, and potentially install it across the instructional lab’s computers.

Though I had (and still have) minimal experience with PowerShell scripting, it didn’t take much Googling to find a relevant built-in command. A little tweaking, and I had a one-liner that Rainmeter could call every couple seconds and display the port number + description of each active device.

Improvements

Now that the Arduino IDE enumerates the available serial ports in real-time, there’s not much need for an additional widget to show what the board you just plugged in shows up as. Plus, my little hack is Windows-only, while the IDE seems to be equally convenient on Mac and Linux machines.

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