A long time ago when I started working on the Kakapo design, I had some specific goals in mind. Arduino is an excellent platform, but it has been accused of hiding too much from the user and doing so by burning cycles - on an already constrained platform.

I sort of get where people are coming from, digitalWrite() is very piggy, slow, and hides things which should be part of an understanding of state. But by the same token, I think people have to start somewhere.

That said, it doesn't mean they have to stay there. So one of the major goals of Kakapo was an intermediate board with boilerplate drivers but very little in the way of wholesale abstraction. The intention is you learn more about avr-libc and embedded dev along the way. I also admit I have a bias against C++ in embedded at this scale, and prefer pure C.

So that's where libkakapo comes in. It provide some drivers for hardware to get you started, but doesn't expose quite everything. It doesn't hide several details. For example, SPI timing is expressed as division of the peripheral clock and not a bitrate, because that's how the hardware works and how the datasheets describe it.

I think it's also hard to follow the Arduino stack, the IDE is quite complex and the way it builds things is interesting but also complex. The libraries have a lot of different hardware to support. libkakapo is focussed on just one board, and simple boilerplate. It's heavily commended and I think easier to read.

Now that the first board is out for beta testing, I'm getting a lot of good feedback on what is needed from a basic library that isn't going down the path of re-implementing digitalWrite(). This I think will really improve the usability out of the box when you want to jump further on from the Arduino IDE.