If the Arduino IDE won't start on Windows (the initialization window appears and disappears without showing any error message or warning), try running arduino_debug.exe
from within the Arduino root folder, which is in C:\Program Files (x86)\Arduino\
by default.
If you get something like the following output there is an issue with the Java memory allocation.
Follow these steps to work around it:
- In the Arduino root folder, open the file
arduino.l4j.ini
with a text editor. - Find the line starting with
-Xmx
. By default, it should be-Xmx512M
. If this is not the case, change the line to read-Xmx512M
. - Try running
arduino_debug.exe
again.
If it still gives the same error, the reason may be that the setting is being overridden by the _JAVA_OPTIONS
environment variable. To test this, run the following command from the cmd
command line in the Arduino root folder.
set _JAVA_OPTIONS=
From the same cmd
session, run the exe.
arduino_debug.exe
The IDE should now start. But note that the _JAVA_OPTIONS
is only unset in the current cmd
session. To make the change permanent, it needs to be unset on the system and/or user level, which is outside the scope of this article. Note that setting the variable in this way may interfere with other applications on your system.