Comment by jwcooper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwcooper | Hacker News Reader

Arduino compatible is misleading in a lot of these cases. It usually means it works with the standard library included with the Arduino IDE, but most of the 3rd party external libraries (note...interesting and useful, and almost always necessary when connecting devices/screens, etc) don't end up working without changes to the libraries themselves.

Take a look at the amount of work that the Teensy3 community has done to make Arduino (atmel) specific libraries compatible with the ARM chip on the Teensy3. They're one of the few communities that have wide-ranging support with an ARM chip, but have put in a lot of time and effort to get it there.

“Arduino compatible” is often also used to refer to the structure of the pins. This one claims to be “Breadboard compatible.”

is it? the attiny85 is still marketed as being arduino compatible, but with only 6 i/o pins, it is nothing like any other arduino product.

They appear to mean compatible with breadboards (i.e. you can attach pins to it with standard spacing), not some sort of hardware form factor similarity.

"Arduino compatible" refers to the structure of the pins for external accessory hardware, but not for actual microcontrollers, which is what this is.

They also clarify a bit farther that they are, in fact, referring to software compatibility:

    ARDUINO COMPATIBLE

    NavSpark is designed to run Wiring, the same simple code as the Arduino platform. There is no need to learn any new programming language or environment. Your standard Arduino sketches run on NavSpark.

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