dropping board support for jiminy-mega256rfr2

Hi,

I just opened a pull request to drop the jiminy-mega256rfr2 [1]. If you want this board to remain supported, please drop a line there.

# Reasoning

## Inclusion policy

During the maintainer assembly in Helsinki I understood that our inclusion policy is that a board needs to fulfill at least one of the following conditions to get merged:

    1. It is actively maintained     2. It has a significant user base     3. It is an off-the-shelf product, so it might be easily obtained for        testing

The Jiminy is clearly not an off the shelf product and it has not been maintained for many month now. And I personally doubt that there are more than two active users of the board. (I think it is safe to say that two users do not count as significant user base.)

## Trade-off

Support for the board has real costs. It has delayed quite a number of PRs, as no one stepped up to testing it. Without knowing how many active users the board has (if any), it is unclear how big the benefit of having it upstream is. But if my guess of two or less active users is correct, I'd say the costs of maintenance outweighs the benefits

Kind regards, Marian

PS: I marked the PR as RFC and as "needs more than one ACK", so the board will not be deleted right away. But please make yourself heard within the next two weeks if you want to speak out for keeping it.

[1]: https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT/pull/12182

Note that we have started to maintain a board with the same CPU, the merkurboard http://osdwiki.open-entry.com/doku.php/en:projekte:merkur

We're maintaining a fork of contiki for this board but since contiki-ng started nobody seems to maintain the 'classic' version anymore, the -ng version seems to be solely targeting 16 or more bit CPUs. See our fork https://github.com/osdomotics/osd-contiki

So we're currently looking into RIOT for this board. If you drop support for the jiminy-mega256rfr2, please don't drop support for the mega256rfr2 processor.

We've tested the RIOT support that exists for the mega256rfr2 and it looks ok, flashing (with Arduino-compatible bootloader) using AVRdude etc. works fine.

The radio-support for the mega256rfr2 is lacking, though, we were not able to get 802.15.4 / 6loWPAN working so far. We're prepared to put some work into the radio layer. Questions we're currently facing will follow in separate mailinglist threads.

Ralf

Hi Ralf,

maybe you could join the effort to support the 802.15.4 transceiver in PR 9172 [1]?

Kind regards, Marian

[1]: https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT/pull/9172

Cool, thanks for the pointer.

Ralf