I just connected my new spark and tried the led blinking example. All works fine, but I find the time needed to flash such a tiny application very long, nearly a minute.
I usually wrote software for AVRs on a locally installed IDE, and flashing even a big programm to the AVR via ISP is much faster. I like the fast turnaround time for debugging.
So why is flashing of the spark via Web IDE so slow. Is it just the Web IDE? Will it be faster if I build the local IDE?
Or is there another way, maybe via USB?
I would like to develop my application first locally without Wifi so there is no need to even do the connection stuff. Then, when everything is working I will enable the networking stuff. Is that a realistic way?
compiling and flashing locally (not local cloud) via usb takes me about 20secs total, there’s a thread about it here somewhere. i find it much faster than the web ide, there’s obviously network latency etc. to take into account there.
There are some guides in the tutorial section which you should definitely check out. Setting op a local build environment might be useful, but the Spark CLI is really neat as well! Great for flashing over USB quickly, without too much hassle.
The spark-cli (https://github.com/spark/spark-cli) and dfu-util let you compile remotely but flash locally. We’re also working on speeding up the OTA flash. Right now the current process is latency bound, so high latency will cause the OTA flash to be very slow, and we’re working on improving that.