Hey Jim, welcome to the SmartMatrix community! Sorry to hear you’re struggling. I’ve heard of people having a lot of issues with the latest Arduino releases, and have been holding off trying them myself. I know people are having similar issues with lots of projects, including Aurora, as documented here: Aurora compilation errors on Arduino 1.6.6 and later - #9 by Jason
If you haven’t already, you might want to try Arduino 1.6.5-r5 and Teensyduino 1.27, as documented here: Compiling · pixelmatix/aurora Wiki · GitHub
Let me know if you still have problems on those version. I hope to have time to try for myself sometime tomorrow.