Looking for some direction

[Patrick Mahan]

On 12/4/16 6:51 AM, Warren Block wrote:
> On Sat, 3 Dec 2016, Patrick Mahan wrote:
> 
>> All,
>>
>> I am buying an arduino board to do some hobbyist stuff in robotics and other
>> real-time control (sound, audio, etc).  I see that there are multiple arduino
>> ports in the ports tree, but I don't see a mailing list for arduino directly and
>> what I have seen via google-fu seems to be a few years out of date.
>>
>> Is there a group of tinkers inside the FreeBSD community who are currently
>> playing with the latest arduino platforms?
> 
> Define "latest" :)
> 

Well, I've got the what is labeled arduino-1.6.13-linux64.tar.xz and
arduino-1.6.13-macosx.zip.  Looking at the Makefile for the ports tree I see
there is a
devel/arduino which seems to be centered on v1.0.6 while devel/arduino16 seems
to be 1.6.12.

> Unfortunately, the FreeBSD Arduino ports are only for the Atmel
> microcontrollers.  Other processors like ARM and the ESP8266 need both a newer
> version of the Arduino port and the associated toolchain.
> 

Well, I'm ordering the Arduino 101
(https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoard101) which seems like a good entry
platform for doing both robotics and as a control board for controlling various
lighting items, etc. (this is something I'm working on with my son-in-law who
wants to be a DJ).  It uses the Intel Curie architecture and has 14 Digital I/O
pins, 4 PWN pins and 6 analog pins plus a accelerometer/gyro.  The Curie is a
hyrid 32-bit x86 core and ARC core.

> That said, the ATmega microcontrollers are pretty capable, and the Arduino IDE is
> the same across platforms.  It's inexpensive to try it out.

It is that, $30 for the 101, I'm thinking of buying 4.

Thanks,

Patrick