dhenry:
Oh I can, I did a lot of research last night.
Then you need to redo your research.
You aren't helping one bit. Stop post farming or help.
fungus:
I would have thought AVR chips were better for low power consumption than ARM. 32-bits is a disadvantage for that. You can get AVR power consumption down into the microamps with a bit of work (use sleep mode with interrupts to wake it up).
Hm, that is a really good point! I've never worked with interrupts. Never quite grasped them. I've gotten pretty far without needing them though. Do you have any resources for learning them besides arduino pages?
MichaelMeissner:
Besides the Due, there are quite a few other Arm processors out there, with different features. I happen to have the Teensy 3.0 (Teensy USB Development Board) myself that uses the Arduino IDE. I bought it on a whim when it was in the kickstarter phase, but it does seem to work fine. I do have some minor issues with it with how it is programmed under Linux, and I need to deal with devices running at 3.3v instead of 5v. However, being able to be dropped in a breadboard is more convenient than the Uno is some cases.
However, you might want to step back, and look at whether your current hardware is too slow or you don't have enough memory. For a lot of things people use Arduinos for, speed is not an issue, since they are waiting for external events. If you are doing audio processing (other than using a wave shield to play a pre-recorded sound), you probably find the Arduino challenging in that it probably can't keep up with the speed, and it likely needs more memory as well.
On the other hand, if you want to do video processing, both the Due and the Teensy 3.0 are too slow, and you need to step up to something faster. The Raspberry Pi runs at a much faster clock rate (700Mhz vs. 84Mhz for the Due and 16Mhz for the Uno), and has much more memory (originally 256 megabytes, now 512 megabytes). However, for really high speed video, the Pi might be limited because the GPU is not completely open. However, there are tradeoffs in running on the Pi (the default OS is Linux rather than running on bare metal, but there are ways to run bare metal, and the GPIO pins are more limited than the Arduinos).
It all depends on what you need, and whether you are willing to do things differently than before.
I have seen the Teensy before. I looked into it while the Due was still being waited on. Issue with that is I still will have trouble getting off of the bootloader kind of platform. And i'm still just as clueless with an ARM.
I won't be doing visual processing at all. Its just a few leds and sensing capabilities. The thing that gets me still is the power consumption, like the guy said earlier, I could use interrupts to solve that, although I will then run into another problem with clock speed. This will be powered by a LiPo battery (3.7v) and to get the ATmega32u4 or 328p up to 16MHz clock speed, I need the full 5v. I've never done a buck-boost application or basic transistor stuff. Is there a simple solution that can solve that or would an 8MHz clock speed be okay for just sensing with gyro, megneto, and accel sensors?