A script (package) to analyze the footprints of Arduino librarer
I recenctly added another library to extend the functionality to one of my projects. After compiling it used 100% of the available storage on my Arduino Micro.
Since the project itself isn't huge, I wondered what exactly used so much space.
So I started to do some analysis.
For this I created an empty Project, only calling empty void loop( ) and void setup() to get an offset for the storage usage when compiled.
Afterwards I opened the (for me) most basic looking example provided with the library and compiled it, that gave me a second data point.
I did that with several libraries for the VL53L0X sensor.
| Library | Example - ino used | program storage used | dynamic storage used |
|---|---|---|---|
| Empty sketch | none | 3462 | 149 |
| Adafruit_VL53L0X | vl53l0x | 19346 | 1201 |
| DFRobot_VL53L0X | vl53l0x | 8232 | 445 |
| Grove-Ranging-sensor-VL53L0X | continuous_ranging | 18894 | 1395 |
| vl53l0x-arduino | Continuous | 9576 | 431 |
The Arduino Micro I use has a total of
- 28672 Bytes program storage
- 2560 Bytes dynamic storage The program storage offset is 3462 Bytes, so 25210 Bytes are remaining.
Adafruits library uses 15884, equal to 63% of it.
DFRobot_VL53L0X on the other side uses 4770 Bytes, equal to 19% of the avaiable program storage
After reviewing the results I decided that the differences are so huge, that I`ll write a script collection to collect that data automatically
- Debian 11 Server
- PHP 8.1.13
- arduino-cli (brew install)
- mysql / maria-db server
- A list with urls to the library repositories
- A library is cloned, the properties defined within extracted
- All examples provided with the library will be compiled
- The result for the example with the smallest footprint is saved in the database (since there are even within the official Arduino Library list libaries with the same repo-name, the system will use a combination of the repo-url and provided name as well as version as identifyer)
- .... maybe more... but that's the starting point.
- Different build platforms
I'll run the script for a lot of libraries on different platforms (for libraries which doesn't compile under avr:micro) The results, as search and sortable table can be found here