The Teensy 3.1 is a very small 72Mhz AVR based microcontroller studded with enough analog and digital I/O ports to control a small robot army. It's relatively fast, very low power, and ... tiny - you could lay about six of them next to each other on a credit card. It is made by PJRC and can be purchased from the usual suspects (Sparkfun, Pololu, Adafruit) for less than the usual shipping charge (ie, about us$20 + tax).

It has more than 30 I/O ports, most of which can configured to play different roles: PWM, serial, CAN, i2c,

Getting started

First off (using a recent Oracle Java 8 on my Yosemite iMac), I installed Arduino 1.6 and was able to grab and install the recent version of the tennsyduino specific add-ons compatible with that Arduino release from http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_121-beta6/teensyduino.dmg

The teensy loader app (also downloaded from pjrc.com) installed, found and recognized the board (plugged in via USB), but I was unable to run the supplied Teensy blink example.

Since being stuck with apps is not really feasible for any kind of scalable and testable production setup, I am just going to ignore that and install a command line based toolchain. Luckily, somebody (thank you, Ladislas de Toldi!) already put most of these pieces together:

# see http://nothingtodisplay.org/avr-toolchain-with-homebrew-mac-os-x/

brew tap WeAreLeka/avr 
brew install avr-libc

Now, the next step is figuring out how to build one of the examples into a hex file and load it using the teensy bootloader. This will give me some reassurance that this is a feasible development setup. Stay tuned...