You Can Now Drag and Drop Files Onto Your Arduino Like a Thumb Drive

The entire purpose of Arduino boards is to make it as easy as possible to prototype electronic devices. And they have certainly accomplished that goal — the widespread use of Arduino development boards in the maker community is proof of that. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t improvements that could be made to make it even easier to use an Arduino. For example, copying anything other than standard code to Arduino storage has always been tricky. But Adafruit has released a new library that makes it easy to copy images, audio files, or whatever else you want to an Arduino just like it was a thumb drive.

Fans of Adafruit development boards know that this is already a feature that’s present on all of their devices that run CircuitPython. When you plug a CircuitPython board into your computer, a USB disk drive automatically pops up. All you have to do is drag over the files you want to copy. They’re seamlessly transferred, and the board resets to use the new files. But that feature hasn’t been present on any Arduino boards before. Now, for the very first time, it is — at least on a somewhat experimental basis.

This utilizes the TinyUSB stack, and simply adds Arduino IDE support for it. Once you flash the library and corresponding code, you won’t have to use the Arduino IDE to copy files. All you need to do is drag them to the disk drive. However, this will not work with all Arduino boards. It only works with boards that use a Microchip SAM D21 or SAM D51 microcontroller. Those are quickly growing in popularity, but most Arduino boards still use other chips. But, if you do have a board with a SAM D21 or SAM D51, it might be worth giving this library a try.