First time use

Automatic installation of arduino-cli is not yet implemented. In the interim you need to do this manually.

When you open an arduino project that you have not previously opened with this extension, VS Code will look like the following illustration. Look at the right hand end of the status bar.

• M:undefined means you have yet to set a serial monitor port.
• Choose a board means what it says.

Click on Choose a board to make QuickPick list appear:

Type the name of your board. VS Code will do fancy progressive matching until you find and click your board.

I have a Nano:

Notice that the vanilla Nano says it uses arduino:avr whereas other flavours say they will install other cores. This is because I have already installed the arduino:avr core. If you select a board that requires a core that isn't installed the extension will install it.

Now that the extension knows what board you have it will prompt you to pick a serial port.

Currently this fails to populate the list. Click on M:undefined and it will retry successfully. If you click on D:NOT SET you will get a list of deployment methods which includes all the hardware programmers supported by your board and all the detected USB serial ports.

When you open the INO file, Compile and Deploy commands should appear at top right, like this:

The Flash command will not appear until you specify a hardware programmer because you can't flash the bootloader without one. Notice that I have already selected the USBasp programmer in this snap.