[Arm-netbook] riki200 v3 first print: success

[Elena ``of Valhalla'']

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).

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.

https://packages.debian.org/sid/arduino-core
https://packages.debian.org/sid/arduino

To really reduce size they would have to drop gcc, but I don't think
that would be a reasonable choice for just the aim of side reduction.

Other than assuming that beginners will be fine with just their IDE (and
targeting their documentation at them), I don't think they ever did
anything to prevent people from going deeper on their own, as they
learned more, including using the arduino board as an AVR devboard
completely ignoring the arduino software.

>  so they're stepping well outside of the "normal" boundaries - good
> luck to them.

Fully agree here: what they are doing lately makes them at the very
least quite irrelevant to the Open Hardware world.

-- 
Elena ``of Valhalla''