I have been working with single board computers like the Beaglebone and Gumstix for a while now and have run into numerous frustrations. Most of the issues deal with various Linux quirks where I spend much of my time debugging operating system issues, searching online for explanations of cryptic error messages and tearing my hair out trying to install a random dependency for a random version of a program using a random package manager that the random Linux distribution uses (yuck!). So for now I have ditched attempting to use single board Linux computers in my robots.

Enter the Atmel Arm-based solutions…

I have purchased Atmel’s SAMU-EK Evaluation kit for the SAM3U4E Cortex-M3 Microcontroller.

I am running Atmel Studio 6 under windows for now as a learn to develop for this new (to me) architecture and hope to put together a toolchain under Linux in the future.

So far I have managed to blink and LED with this board. Not exciting at all but it is a start! More to come…