Hi, I have some experience with the Arduino. I teach kids at school how to
use Arduino's. I am using laptops with Debian installed. The Arduino is then
connected to the laptop trough serial USB and we use the official Arduino IDE
(which is in the Debian repo's as well as Parabola and I suspect Trisquel). I
also have a 3d printer using an Arduino MEGA.
We use the Arduino UNO to blink LED's, sound buzzers and we build a robot
(with an extra motor shield[1]). The programming is done on the laptop in the
IDE (which is very similar to C) and then compiled and uploaded to the board
.The board does not run an OS or something like that. The advantage is that
the program is stored on the board and start the moment the board gets power.
I can just connect a 9V battary and it will start the last uploaded program
which makes it ideal for robots and projects that have no need for a
computer.
On Debian it is plug and play but I had some trouble getting it to work on
Parabola. A few days ago I sent some time on #parabola IRC in order to get it
to work. There were problems with avrdude and at the moment i only got it
working as root.
Regarding teaching children and programming, I also use Raspberry Pi's (i
have posted about it on this board before) but am looking to change that. I
have also tried the BeagleBone (black and the new Green one with grove
connectors and wifi), the Orange Pi plus and the Banana Pi but they all have
some sort of negative side compared with the Pi.
The Banana Pi seems the best bet and i am running it with ARMbian at the
moment and I have also installed Arch on one of the board which I am trying
to convert to Parabola but no luck up yet. If anyone has some ideas on this I
would be happy to hear them.
Hope this helps a bit, let me know if you need more info!
[1] https://hackerstore.nl/Artikel/464
