English is a two-pane workbench that runs in your browser. You describe what you want on the left in ordinary words, and a working Arduino program appears on the right. If you've got a board plugged into your USB port, you can send the program to it without installing a thing.

No Arduino IDE, no drivers to hunt down, no toolchain. Just a browser.

What you'll need

A browser. Anything modern will do for writing and compiling. To actually flash a board you need Chrome, Edge or Opera, because Firefox and Safari don't support the USB standard we use.
A free Little Bird account to turn English into code. Having a look around and running the worked examples doesn't need one.
An Arduino and a USB cable, if you want to run the thing on real hardware. Everything except Upload works fine with no board on the desk.

Your first program

Open littlebirdelectronics.com.au/english.
In the left pane, type something like blink the built-in LED once a second.
Wait about three seconds. The code writes itself into the right pane, line by line. In a hurry? Press ⌘↵ (Mac) or Ctrl-↵ (Windows and Linux) to translate straight away.
Click Verify. That compiles the sketch in the cloud and tells you how many bytes it came to. You don't need a board plugged in for this.
Plug your Arduino in, click Pair board…, pick it from the list your browser shows, then click Upload.

The console underneath narrates the whole upload: the reset pulse, the bootloader answering, the chip it found, how many bytes went across. When it says the board is rebooting into your sketch, look at your Arduino. That LED should be blinking.

It translates while you type

You don't have to click anything. About three seconds after you stop typing, English re-translates on its own. Keep typing and the clock restarts, so it won't interrupt you mid-thought.

Small edits give you small code changes. If your new English is still broadly similar to the last version, we send the previous program along and ask for the smallest possible edit, so the rest of your code stays exactly as it was. Rewrite the whole thing and you'll get a fresh program, which is usually what you want anyway.

After each translation the console prints a short summary, and if the AI had to assume something (a pin number you didn't mention, say) it tells you what it picked.

Start from an example instead

Press ⌘K or Ctrl-K for the Examples library. There are more than twenty worked programs in there, from Blink and fading an LED through to reading a sensor and plotting a voltage.

Examples are completely free and need no account, because each one ships with its code already translated. Load one, read how the English maps to the code, then change a number and make it yours.

Do I need an account?

Looking around is free. The examples are free. Translating your own English into code needs a free Little Bird customer account, because every translation costs us real money at the AI end.

It's the ordinary store account, and you can create one or sign in without leaving the IDE. Whatever you've already typed is kept, and if you clicked Translate before signing in, it runs by itself the moment you're through.

One thing worth knowing so it doesn't puzzle you: while you're signed out, the automatic translate quietly does nothing rather than throwing an error. If the right pane seems to be ignoring you, check whether the Translate button is greyed out.

Where to next

Compiling and flashing from your browser, including which boards can be flashed and which can't.
Which Arduino libraries you can use, and how to get one into your sketch.
The Serial Monitor, plotter and data logger.
Troubleshooting, for when something doesn't behave.

Getting started with English