SmartBASIC Syntax Highlighting in Visual Studio Code Now Available

Published on November 10, 2021

smartBASIC Highlighting for Visual Studio Code

Ezurio (formerly Laird Connectivity) is dedicated to helping our customers work with the software and tools they already love, expanding design flexibility and dramatically reducing time to market. We do this in a number of ways, such as providing support for many operating systems, providing sample applications and reference designs, and with the creation of our smartBASIC application language. Our smartBASIC language abstracts hundreds or thousands of lines of C code into a number of simple commands that provide commonly-needed functionality for our line of smartBASIC-enabled Bluetooth, LoRaWAN, and LTE modules.

In the past, we’ve provided plugins and tools for popular text editors, such as Notepad++, Textpad, and Sublime Text, which provide helpful color-coordinated syntax highlighting to make smartBASIC code easier to write and work with. We’re now providing the same functionality for Microsoft Visual Studio Code, the widely-used IDE and code editor enjoyed by developers around the world. Based on the syntax files for the BL652, BL653, and BL654 provided for Notepad++, this implementation requires only one syntax file and no need to switch syntax files when working with different modules.

What is smartBASIC?

Our smartBASIC language is the product of years of work and familiarity developing wireless applications. Inspired by the BASIC programming language, it’s optimized for low-cost embedded systems with limited memory by being highly efficient in terms of memory usage. We developed smartBASIC in order to make Bluetooth Low Energy development quicker and simpler, vastly cutting down time to market.

It’s built with automated, hostless applications in mind. With autorun operation that runs the loaded smartBASIC application automatically when powered on, our wireless modules can run completely hostless and independent of a co-processor, with event-driven architecture that is well suited to low-power, autonomous wireless applications.

Using smartBASIC makes it incredibly easy to quickly start running Bluetooth applications on our modules and development kits. They’re provided with prebuilt sample applications for use cases such as LED and Buzzer tests, temperature sensors, heart rate and blood pressure check, virtual serial port, and more. We even provide an AT command set application that makes it possible to easily develop wireless applications with the ease of the classic and familiar Hayes AT command set.

smartBASIC is available for our BT900, BT800, BL652, BL653 and BL653µ, BL654 and BL654PA Bluetooth low energy modules, as well as our Pinnacle 100 LTE-M and NB-IoT modem with Bluetooth 5 and our Sentrius™ RM1xx LoRaWAN + BLE Module.

Learn more at https://www.lairdconnect.com/smartbasic-for-ble.

How Can I Get Syntax Highlighting for smartBASIC in Visual Studio Code?

Ezurio provides this language extension freely on our Github account. The repository for this extension can be found here:

https://github.com/LairdCP/smartBASIC-VS-Code-language-extension

Instructions are provided at the link above. However, installation is quite simple.

Place the full folder cloned or downloaded from this repository in the VS Code extensions folder at:
- Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.vscode\extensions
- MaxOS/Linux: ~/.vscode/extensions

Might require a restart of VS Code.

For full details on the language extension, visit our page on GitHub:

https://github.com/LairdCP/smartBASIC-VS-Code-language-extension