On 07/22/2018 06:20 AM, deloptes wrote:
cyaiplexys wrote:
Well, since I use Debian I assumed this would be a place to ask what to
get from the Debian repo that would help in achieving my goal. But you
do make a good point. I'll have to find some Arduino forums to ask some
questions in because I'm quite sure I'll have a lot of them.
Sure Arduino forums will be useful when you have specific Arduino questions.
Related to debian you have this page
https://wiki.debian.org/Arduino
It looks like it gives you the connection to the arduino board /dev/ttyACM0.
Next CPUs - IMO you definitely need to know for which CPU you develop code
https://www.arduino.cc/en/Products/Compare
but it could be that the IDE hides this.
Salt it with some background knowledge
https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Foundations
It is not a one day exercise, but it may be fun.
>
I did AVR for a hobby. I bought few types of AVR chips a dev board, that I
had to soldier myself and a programmer (total cost ~ €25,-). It took me
some time to understand how the programmer is to be used with the board and
how it is intended to work on linux. I guess it was two weekends that I
spent reading and trying. Finally Enlightment was there and voila, I can
write, compile, flash and run the MCs. Altogether it spanned over 8 months
because of job and family. I think the total time spent was about 1 month
though.
So it depends on your level and skill. It might take months or hours, but at
the end you will be an expert.
When I get into these things, it might take me a few months to maybe
even years to learn something new fully. And some things only take a
weekend. Depends on what skills one needs to get going with it. I have
35+ years programming experience in many different languages, and
tinkered in electronics even as young as age 7. But the thing is, while
I learned the basics (and when Google came around, Googled for stuff I
didn't know that I needed to apply to a project), and even took a couple
online courses in programming, I find it's a matter of use it or lose
it. If I don't use it regularly (like I do with PHP, HTML, CSS, Perl,
and Python in my job), then I tend to forget almost all I learned and
kinda end up Googling for help with everything or looking up my code
snippets and notes.
But at the same time, I enjoy tinkering with stuff, even if I might
forget a year or two later. For my own hobbies, I just get curious about
some of the "new" (I know this stuff has been around awhile) technology
out there and like to see how it all works.
It might be also worth learning some C.
I had done some C programming now and then (K & R C, ANSI C, Mix Power
C, Borland C++, gcc, Visual C) and now anytime I do anything in C, I use
gcc (and also valgrind, autotools, and I forgot what else I use but I
use Kate for my editor for nearly everything and compile at command
line). I still struggle with C because I don't use it much. However, I
use a lot of stuff that has a similar structure to C such as perl and
PHP. Funny thing is, I also learned Java but almost never use it!
I am not sure how python compiles low level code, but I guess it
> comes with overhead.
Python is a scripting language so natively it doesn't get compiled,
really. To compile Python code to binary .so for like Python libraries
(which is NOT required but there are some uses for doing so), I use a
program called 'cython' (in the debian repos) that converts Python code
to C code, then uses gcc to compile the resulting C code. Does a decent
job of it for what I was doing.
> Given the amount of memory available, it might be wise to keep low
> footprint. Also you do not need to know a lot of details. Focus is on
> bitwise operations that are used when working with bits.
I actually haven't done much of that in *years* - since my OS9-Level II
days. Got to brush up on that now.
> But there are very good examples, so if you have an understanding of
> the concept of C language, it shouldn't be a big challenge.
>
> good luck
Good to know. And thank you for all the really good information. I'm
saving it for my "list to learn".
