Workbench FAQ

• Installation Instructions
• Tutorial
• Step by Step Video Guide

Reporting bugs and feedback

• Follow the instructions in this community forum post to report bugs or provide feedback.

• The Developer Tools - Workbench Category in the community forums should be used for Workbench support.

Working with a custom Device OS build

It's possible to work with a non-released branch, fork, or manually merged PRs of Device OS.

• Get the latest Device OS source from GitHub. You'll need to have the command line version of git available in order to retrieve the submodules.

git clone https://github.com/particle-iot/device-os
cd ./device-os
git checkout develop
git submodule update --init --recursive

• Launch Visual Studio Code
• Navigate to your Particle settings (docs) and set the Custom Device OS Location

• Enter the absolute path to your Device OS source code and reload when prompted
• Open a Particle project and open a source file
• Click on the Device OS entry in the status bar to display a list of available toolchains

• Select the deviceOS@source entry - it should be first in the list
• Wait for the toolchain to install and activate
• Run commands (docs) and local compilation tasks as normal (docs)

Error: Unable to load manifest

Unable to load manifest for: ~/path/to/device-os - attempted to load: ~/path/to/device-os/.workbench/manifest.json

Workbench attempts to load a manifest located within the Device OS source repository. If that file isn't available or if you've somehow incorrectly set the Custom Device OS Location setting, you'll see this error.

Uninstalling Workbench

• Open VSCode.
• Click the Extensions button on the left toolbar (Activity bar).
• Click on the gear icon for the Workbench extension and select Uninstall.
• Repeat for the C/C++ and Cortex-Debug extensions
• Close and re-open VSCode, then close it again.
• Delete the ~/.particle/toolchains directory.

Uninstalling VSCode

Mac

• Find your Visual Studio Code.app file (typically in ~/Applications or /Applications)
• Delete Visual Studio Code.app

Windows

• Open Add/Remove Programs.
• Select Microsoft Visual Studio Code and click the Uninstall button

Linux

• Open a terminal
• Run sudo apt-get purge code. This currently only works with Ubuntu and other Debian-style distributions.

Linux Tips

• On 64-bit Linux you may need to install 32-bit libraries:

sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib libarchive-zip-perl libncurses-dev

• If you get a permission error when debugging, you may need to add udev rules.
  • If you have the Particle Workbench, run the Particle: Launch CLI command and then run particle usb configure in the terminal that launches
  • if you just have the Particle CLI, open a terminal and run particle usb configure
  • Otherwise, you can download 50-particle.rules and copy it to /etc/udev/rules.d/