MPIDE for Chipkit PI on Raspberry PI running Raspian

This forum has some good information on that:

http://chipkit.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=17

The Pic32 is a great chip but will require relearning everything.  That is NOT the point of the chipkit, the point is to NOT have to learn how to use a Pic32, but rather to be able to use a Pic32 with arduino knowledge only.

I have been reading on that forum and confirmed the Servo library does not work.  I can understand why, the servo library requires the use of timers and interrupts so it is not easy to code.

I will have to manually code my servos and the update process will be blocking instead of  non blocking.

It appears the ChipKit Pi, as well as all the other version such as chip kit UNO have much work to be done.  However the ChipKit has been around a long time so I am concerned it has not progressed very far yet.  I see posts from 2011 about the servo library not working, nearly 4 years ago!  Not a good sign and so if you want to use the chipkit Pi, you will have much research and testing to do.

To be honest, I prefer software bugs than hardware problems.  Me too I have found too few documentation on this board than the number of pieces in stock on the farnell national sites.

I suspect that the error maybe just this "full arduino compatible". This create the illusion that it is so stupid board that you can plug, power and play. Then the worst thing is that it mask most of the real potential of the board itself.

That is the reason that I have decided to work with it.

It is very powerful.

Probably I have the advantage that I have not the Arduino IDE background only but it is the opposite. I usually develop under a C++ environment without the bootloader. Then to make some products "arduino compatible" I am obliged to create sketches and Arduino libraries to make these working fine on the makers world. But - IMHO - it is not programming micro controllers, it's a bare illusion

The only thing that I can do is to support as much as possible the things with the parts that I will develop. The problem remain that I have not yet clear what kind of development environment I should use to seriously develop with this processor. I mean something different than the IDE

To be honest, I prefer software bugs than hardware problems.  Me too I have found too few documentation on this board than the number of pieces in stock on the farnell national sites.

I suspect that the error maybe just this "full arduino compatible". This create the illusion that it is so stupid board that you can plug, power and play. Then the worst thing is that it mask most of the real potential of the board itself.

That is the reason that I have decided to work with it.

It is very powerful.

Probably I have the advantage that I have not the Arduino IDE background only but it is the opposite. I usually develop under a C++ environment without the bootloader. Then to make some products "arduino compatible" I am obliged to create sketches and Arduino libraries to make these working fine on the makers world. But - IMHO - it is not programming micro controllers, it's a bare illusion

The only thing that I can do is to support as much as possible the things with the parts that I will develop. The problem remain that I have not yet clear what kind of development environment I should use to seriously develop with this processor. I mean something different than the IDE

I've made a bunch of progress, getting information over in the ChipKit forum.  I got most of my stuff working, its a nice board once I learned some of the nuances and there are several.  Several of the OI pins on the board are fakes so beware of that.