OK now that you have Arduino IDE set up, drivers installed if necessary and you've practiced uploading code, you can start installing all the Libraries we'll be using to program it.

There's a lot of libraries!

Install Libraries

Open up the library manager...

And install the following libraries:

Adafruit Arcada

This library generalizes the hardware for you so you can read the joystick, draw to the display, read files, etc. without having to worry about the underlying methods

If you aren't running Arduino IDE 1.8.10 or later, you'll need to install all of the following!

Adafruit NeoPixel

This will let you light up the status LEDs on the front/back

Adafruit FreeTouch

This is the open source version of QTouch for SAMD21 boards

Adafruit Touchscreen

Used by Adafruit Arcada for touchscreen input (required even if your Arcada board does not have a touchscreen)

Adafruit SPIFlash

This will let you read/write to the onboard FLASH memory with super-fast QSPI support

Adafruit Zero DMA

This is used by the Graphics Library if you choose to use DMA

Adafruit GFX

This is the graphics library used to draw to the screen

If using an older (pre-1.8.10) Arduino IDE, locate and install Adafruit_BusIO (newer versions do this one automatically).

Adafruit ST7735

The display on the PyBadge/PyGamer & other Arcada boards

Adafruit ILI9341

The display on the PyPortal & other Arcada boards

Adafruit LIS3DH

For reading the accelerometer data, required even if one is not on the board

Adafruit Sensor

Needed by the LIS3DH Library, required even if one is not on the board

Adafruit ImageReader

For reading bitmaps from SPI Flash or SD and displaying

ArduinoJson

We use this library to read and write configuration files

Adafruit ZeroTimer

We use this library to easily set timers and callbacks on the SAMD processors

Adafruit TinyUSB

This lets us do cool stuff with USB like show up as a Keyboard or Disk Drive

Adafruit WavePlayer

Helps us play .WAV sound files.

SdFat (Adafruit Fork)

The Adafruit fork of the really excellent SD card library that gives a lot more capability than the default SD library

Audio - Adafruit Fork

Our fork of the Audio library provides a toolkit for building streaming audio projects.