On Fri, 22 Jun 2012, Ian Smith wrote:
I thought I saw something somewhere (maybe just wishful thinking) about FreeBSD on the Arduino, which normally runs a sort of embedded Linux, that could be very interesting; the hardware is cheap (kits at Jaycar stores in Australia anyway), very modular design, and there are heaps of fascinating projects. I want the quadricopter to follow me around the room at parties - at my age I need something really impressive :)
Well, there is devel/arduino. It's not emdedded Linux, but an IDE for writing and downloading code. The Arduino is a small embedded controller based on the Atmel AVR microcontrollers. They are quite powerful, easy to program, and accessible for experimenters. You can skip the Arduino environment if you like, using the same lower-level tools like avr-gcc directly. And the Arduino board can be used as a programmer, downloading code to plain AVR chips and avoiding the need for more Arduino boards. Talk about the Arduino on FreeBSD is generally on the freebsd-embedded mailing list.
The Microchip PIC microcontrollers compete with the AVR. There are some FreeBSD ports for programming those, but there are many varying chips and the hardware needed to program some of them differs. I don't know if there is anything directly comparable to the Arduino IDE. ARM processors have become so cheap that they are starting to compete in this arena also.
On the FreeBSD side there's advanced work, I gather, on ARM and Atmel MEGA 32-bit and MIPS platforms at least. Personally I consider these 'big iron' and far prefer writing in macro assembler for little Atmel Tiny25s and such, but that's strictly "Look Ma, no OS!" programming.
Another option: the freebsd-wireless list has had some very interesting traffic about the TP-Link TL-WR1043ND, a $50 MIPS-based wireless router with Atheros 802.11n chipset, USB, and gigabit Ethernet which can run FreeBSD directly. Not sure how usable it is at present.
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