Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net writes:
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 10:15 AM, Elena ``of Valhalla'' valhalla-l@trueelena.org wrote:
On 2017-09-18 at 07:07:04 +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
the entire arduino software ecosystem was never designed to actually give people proper access to the hardware. anything that's a 180mb download and requires a 200mb runtime environment to compile and upload an executable that's only 16k in size *really* isn't going to end well.
Well, IIRC they do bundle gcc(-avr), which tends to be quite big, but doesn't really need to be downloaded again if you already have it from your distribution, and the runtime environment is only needed if you want to use their IDE instead of your favourite editor + a Makefile (and there is (was?) at least one example Makefile somewhere in the arduino package).
yehyeh... it wasn't always like that.
Looking at the installed sizes on debian (which has an older version for license reasons) I see that the libraries are about 6½MB and the IDE itself is just 1½MB.
phil was instrumental in arranging that.
https://packages.debian.org/sid/arduino-core https://packages.debian.org/sid/arduino
yep he recommended to the arduino package maintainer that the actual core parts not be glommed together with a runtime and IDE and everything else.
Well, I reacted badly to the Java UI (because it was ludicrously broken under tiling window managers -- the menu required you to click the screen elsewhere to get anywhere, and my screen wasn't wide enough to click anything on the sub-menus ;-) ), and noticed that it was actually possible to use a Makefile, and that there were several Makefiles in circulation, so chose what looked to be the most maintained one, and suggested that the author pick up the nice features in the other ones, and then stuck that together as the arduino-core package.
Then we worked out how to make the arduino package play nicely with that, in order to remove the duplication, so ironically I'm now an uploader on both, including the Java bits, despite the fact that my only motivation at the start was driven by my aversion to Java.
As it happens, I fired up my arduino for the first time since doing the arduino-core uploads last week -- My 5 year old daughter and I are knocking up something to drive some LEDs and a motor in order to make her IKEA kitchen have a working turntable in the microwave, and a blue LED to simulate water coming out of the tap, etc.
I was actually using the IDE for that (which now works with Xmonad) just for expediency, but this reminds me that I should use it as an excuse to make sure that arduino-core still works.
Cool :-)
BTW you called it 'R3D3' in the penultimate paragraph.
Cheers, Phil.