A friend and I are working on a project that could potentially be used by a large number of users. Artemis boards (nano in particular) seem to be almost perfect in terms of power consumption, form factor, and ease of programming. Both of us, however, are concerned about product lifespan. One entry on a web page says the Arduino Core won’t work past Arduino IDE 1.8.12; that’s not even the latest legacy IDE version. Several libraries, particularly those having to do with Wire() calls, require an older library version. I also saw another post somewhere about the boards needing a firmware/bootloader update. A lot of the stuff on the website is 4 and 5 years old. It seems almost like you guys haven’t abandoned the project wholly, but either are close to it or just getting bored.
Could Sparkfun provide a comprehensive update on this line? Future plans, current firmware, current IDE, known problems? It would be either (a) reassuring or (b) give us some direction for an alternative for an MCU that is nearing end of life.
This post is NOT meant to be critical or antagonistic (I could do much better if I were trying ) but this is a niche, SparkFun only product which may no longer warrant a lot of work. If that’s the case, I’d like to know that it is time to move on.
I have done a lot of development on the Artemis boards and library. Some of the points you mention above are not correct. The library works on the 2.xx version of the IDE, no need for older Wire(). The major issue on the Nano is when using Serial1. That required a change which was not implemented by Sparkfun, as a couple of others.
That said: your question is 100% valid. The library has not been updated for many years and the MBED core, where V2.x of the library depends on, is being end-of-life by ARM ( Important update on Mbed - End of Life - Mbed OS - Arm Mbed OS support forum ). Although it needs to be called out that V2.x used only a VERY SMALL portion of MBED, mainly to connect to the Artemis driver.
I have not seen a pro-active life cycle management on any of the products from Sparkfun. It looks to be dependent on the current sales & stock of the products.
Personally… If this is a new project I would look at recent boards (e.g. ESP32 Thing plus with good embedded communication like Bluetooth, Wifi, Zigbee / Thread, Matter). The ESP32 has many different form factors & processor versions and the library is very well maintained.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. A couple of comments. My concerns about the Wire() library had to do with using an external RTC on I2C. All the error messages had to do with Wire() related calls. I’m a reasonable intermediate programmer, but I freely confess to being heavily dependent on libraries and I didn’t know how to troubleshoot further.
If you look at this webpage, and scroll about 1/3 down, you’ll see the reference to which IDE to use.
SparkFun has gone to great lengths to “own” this board and proudly touts its in-house development. To me, that gives them much more responsibility in terms of library maintenance and life cycle management. Here I am being a bit critical.
The ESP32 chips have a lot going for them. However, when on, they consume a fair bit of power and wake from sleep relatively slowly (30 msec in my experiments). This was not going to work for us. However, we’ve been looking at an alternative design paradigm and it might be worth a revisit. Right now, we’re looking at some SAMD21 boards.
Again, thanks for the interesting and thoughtful comments
I looked at the webpage..I now understand your point. It seems the version that was in use at the time was an early version of V1.0.x After that there have been at least 5 V1.1.x releases and 9 V2.x releases. It is outdated information that should have been updated.
) but this is a niche, SparkFun only product which may no longer warrant a lot of work. If that’s the case, I’d like to know that it is time to move on.