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Comment by ceequof | Hacker News Reader

http://hackaday.com/2015/03/12/arduino-v-arduino-part-ii/

Note that the arduino.cc store is out of stock of pretty much everything, which makes sense if Arduino Srl is no longer manufacturing anything for them: http://store.arduino.cc/category/11

Additionally, tinkerkit.com (Arduino LLC's line of branded sensors for Arduino boards) has been down for at least a year now, which sucks, since that's where all the example code and datasheets are kept. We've seen sales for those drop through the floor.

The legal battle seems to have significantly impacted operations at Ardunio LLC, to the point that they're not really a functioning company anymore.

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An interesting tale. It never ceases to amaze me how poorly people can behave. And, yeah, maybe this does explain why they seem to have not really made it past their initial burst of creativity. At some point the BeagleBone Black and the π2 just make a whole lot more sense. I still have a soft spot for the Due w/ a PoE shield though.

Agreed with your general sentiment, but the BeagleBone Black is still quite lacking when it comes to documentation.

I'm a very experienced web developer, but am new to programming for embedded type devices. While the BeagleBone Black in browser development environment is quite nice, the lack of documentation makes it hard to figure out fairly basic things like reading values from a gyroscope/accelerometer/magnetometer. A lot of this hardware has existing libraries for Arduino, which is why in my opinion the Arduino is still a superior platform for anyone who is somewhat new to embedded computing.

I agree. I'm the opposite: a very experienced embedded developer but relatively new to web development (though my BBB is currently serving up a page monitoring my mechanical room).

It's like pulling teeth to find out any but the most basic specs of the BBB. I haven't used it much because a lot of what I wanted to do would have required so much experimentation to figure out stuff that should already have been documented. I just don't have that kind of time these days.

Experienced embedded developer here as well.

For some reason I haven't had any trouble with the Beaglebone at all. A kernel driver is a kernel driver, and I2C bus is an I2C bus.

What specs on the BBB do you need, specifically, that are causing you trouble?

It's been a while since I looked at it. IIRC, the main problem I had was that many of the IO lines had shared/multiple functions and I couldn't find any documentation that explained how to switch them.

e.g. (contrived example), if a bit was MOSI for an SPI interface or DIO on port C, I had no idea which one it defaulted to and how to use it for the alternate function.

I got it to work for basic I/O, but it's obviously capable of much more.

If you're running Linux on it, I believe you need to use device tree overlays. See http://kilobaser.com/blog/2014-07-28-beaglebone-black-device...

Interesting. I actually got mine to try and run Scheme on it:

http://armpit.sourceforge.net

Last April there was an hackathon at my university and TinkerKit provided a bunch of kits; they said they could be bought through arduino.cc, so they probably just ditched the TinkerKit website to bring everything together ([The libraries are still on GitHub though](https://github.com/TinkerKit), at least there's that).

I was annoyed with TinkerKit's wire arrangement for their 3-wire connectors. The wire order for most standard hobby servos (e.g. Hitec) are [signal, +v, g], but TinkerKet went with [+v, signal, g]. That means I couldn't easily use most hobby servos with their system. I'm kinda happy TinkerKit's wire arrangement didn't become a more popular standard.

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