Can't seem to get board to work, still

[Daft_vagabond]

My mistake. This is on a windows machine. I installed WSL, made WSL2 the default, have ubuntu running, so I think I'm on track, right? Should I not be in the "Install Build Tools on Ubuntu" section?

The only other time I've done anything linux-related was while messing around with a raspberry pi, so this has all been a crash course of sorts.

[danhalbert]

Should I not be in the "Install Build Tools on Ubuntu" section?

Yes, now you're on the right track.

This is all a lot of work to get pulseio. It is a good learning experience. :) You might consider getting a more capable board anyway, because the size of the program you can write on an M0 is pretty limited.

[Daft_vagabond]

Thank you for your honest input.

I purchased an Itsy Bitsy M0 Express for this project. I got it because it had native 3v3 output on nearly every pin, and the 5! pin has found a good purpose in this project, too.

Maybe I should consider an Itsy Bitsy M4 Express? My understanding is that it's virtually the same as the M0 Express, just with more memory. Is that right?

Or maybe you have a recommendation for something this size with 3v3 logic output?

Off the top of my head, Features I'm looking to use are:
-Servo control (I know this is covered my adafruit_motor)
-General digital I/O, on/off switches, buttons, generic leds, controlling relays (I know this is covered my digitalio)
-pwm output (Covered by pwmio)
-I want to receive serial commands, read and pass them along to another device (I THINK* this is covered by busio and UART stuff)
-Set a custom baud rate so that all the serial devices can play nicely with each other (I now there some serial library or something)
-maybe some analog stuff (covered by analogio)
-timing stuff (covered by time)

-reading pwm inputs, specifically the high-low timing (covered my pulseio)

-A stretch goal I have is to this read an image file then display that image, rapidly moving, on a noepixel display (covered by things like pixelbuf, displayio and neopixel_write, I think)

But really, unless something else comes up, I think the Itsy Bitsy M4 Express has all of these included.

[danhalbert]

Yes, either the ItsyBitsy M4 Express or the ItsyBitsy RP2040 would work out better. The SAMD21 processors were the first line we had, before the SAMD51 and of course the RP2040 were available.

[Daft_vagabond]

I'll probably go with the IB M0 E, as it seems more capable, and only costs a bit more. Though the RP2040 seems to have more memory all around. why is that? I just want to be aware if I'm missing out on anything specific.

[danhalbert]

The RP2040 is a modern M0 design, with a lot of RAM. It does not have flash on chip: all the flash is external. It's cheaper than the M4 ItsyBitsy. It does not have hardware floating point, but it is plenty fast otherwise.