Exploring the new Arduino/Genuino 101

Intel has been maneuvering to open up a niche for itself both in the nanocomputer space (currently dominated by the ARM-based Raspberry Pi) with its Edison [1] and in the realm of microcontroller-based maker hobbyism ruled by the Arduino and Arduino-like hardware, which is typically designed around the ATmega chips built by Atmel.

The 101

To try to get a foot in the door in the latter camp, Intel and Arduino recently teamed up and produced the Arduino 101 [2]. The 101 looks very much like the Uno (Figure 1), and, in many respects, it is compatible. Even the mount holes for screws are in the same place.

Figure 1: The Uno (left) and the new 101 (right), with its rather conspicuous Bluetooth antenna in the upper right-hand corner and two reset buttons at the bottom.

There are a few differences, though. For starters, the 101 has a very conspicuous gold Bluetooth antenna that you can see at the upper right corner. The 101 also has two reset buttons instead of the one on the Uno. The reset button in the bottom left corner resets the sketch, forcing the 101 to start the program over, setup function and all. The reset button on the other side of the USB port does a hard reset when you push it, doing a power cycle for the hardware (i.e., it switches the board off and then on again). Other, non-visible, differences are shown in Table 1.

The Intel Curie processor is twice as fast as the ATmega. The board also comes with more memory, and, apart from Bluetooth, it has an onboard gyroscope and accelerometer.

On the other hand, the Uno has more PWM pins – 6 versus 4 on the 101, but, as I have explained other times in this magazine, you can compensate for that by using a dirt cheap and simple analog port expander [3] [4].

101 Setup

Arduino boards with special features often require special setups, which is the case with the 101. To begin, you'll need the recent version of the Arduino IDE, namely 1.6.7 (at the time of writing) or higher. This is unfortunate, because it means you will not be able to program the 101 from the Raspberry Pi: The Pi's repositories come with a much older version, and there is no easy way to compile the latest Arduino IDE source code for Raspbian.

But, hey, version 1.6.7 is available for GNU/Linux 32 and 64 bits, Windows, and Mac OS X. I'm using Linux, so I'll go with that for these examples.

Download the latest version of the IDE [5], install it, and fire it up. Go to Tools | Board: [name of the board you last used] | Boards Manager. Scroll down until you see the Intel Curie Boards option. Click on it then on Install. Once the download and installation is complete, the Arduino 101 will appear on your board list (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Before you can use your 101, you have to install support for Intel Curie-based boards.

In this article, you'll be seeing a project that uses the 101's gyroscope (I'll exploring other features of the 101 in future articles), so you'll also need the Madgwick library [6]. This library contains functions that turn the raw data from gyroscopes and accelerometers into something intelligible – into numbers you can actually use. To install the library, go to Sketch | Include Library | Manage Libraries and use the search box to narrow down the list (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Install the Madgwick library so you can make sense of the data the gyroscope sends you.

Finally, as the gyroscope gives you information about its orientation in 3D, you will use it to control an object on your screen in 3D. For this, you will be using Panda3D [7], a seriously cool 3D library for Python that lets you create and animate 3D objects (see the box "Installing Panda3D" for more information).

$ git clone https://github.com/  panda3d/panda3d.git

$ python<X> makepanda/makepanda.py --everything --installer --no-egl --no-gles --no-gles2

$ sudo python makepanda/installpanda.py

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential pkg-config python-dev
  libpng-dev libjpeg-dev libtiff-dev zlib1g-dev libssl-dev
  libx11-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libxrandr-dev libxxf86dga-dev
  libxcursor-dev bison flex libfreetype6-dev libvorbis-dev
  libeigen3-dev libopenal-dev libode-dev libbullet-dev
  nvidia-cg-toolkit libgtk2.0-dev