I was wondering if someone could give a little overview on the current (end 2016) situation on installing and running PD, l2-ork or purr-data on recent ARM boards, for somebody just getting into embedded systems (read: somebody terminal-literate, but not savvy enough to compile kernels).

The project is building a display-free modular sampler instrument, so GPIO, USB MIDI and USB audio I/O are paramount. Everything else (WIFI, BT, GPU etc) is secondary.

More specifically:

• Are more recent boards like Pine A64, Odroid C2, Chip (PRO?) or BBB worth considering?
• If so, what's the story on DSP performance/latency and RT kernel tweaks etc, compared to Pi3?

Much obliged,
S

If you've got a reading literacy but not so much of a writing literacy (i.e., compiling) in the terminal, I'd suggest one of the flavors of raspberry pi.

There are probably ninjas here and on the Pd user list that will rattle off impressive latency and performance specs for other boards, but rpi has the largest and most well-documented environment of any of them. Since rpi3 is the same price I'd probably go with that. I haven't tried any kernel tweaks on the rpi so I can't speak to that.

Purr Data and Pd-l2ork should both have binaries that run on rpi2. I think Pd-l2ork has a binary for rpi3 as well.