--- 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.
then there's avr-utils, a few other things, the libraries as well: you can now basically mix and match and use editors and minimal build dependencies... but seriously that's *not* the way it's normally done [by beginners]
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.
yehyeh.
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.
yeah if you've ever heard of the OSMC (Open Source Motor Controller) that uses a PIC, i bought one back in... 2003 or so. 1,000 lines of c, using not even gcc. no libraries, nothing.
.... when i first heard about arduino i was really shocked at how much the dev environment was.
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.
ho hum :) i really wanted to use RADDS because the Duet 0.8.5 and the Duet-NG are almost as much as an entire 3D printer can be sourced for here... only to find that the damn thing's non-free! they're happy to provide a non-commercial license...
... it was the last straw. i spent the weekend making an improved version of RAMPS 1.4 - called RD3D (yes after R2D2...) and it's been sent for first PCB manufacturing, already, this morning. yes i rushed it, yes i realised i'm using only a 500mA regulator which means it might be current-limited: i'll just have to drop a different LDO in place using some wires.
http://reprap.org/wiki/RD3D/1.0
but guess what? it's GPLv3 and it's *properly open*. and awesome. 6 steppers (RAMPS has 5) and 4 MOSFETs (RAMPS has 3) and an on-board MicroSD card and and and.
it was a very... busy... weekend :)
l.