New Arduino Due Brings More Power To the Table 130
mikejuk writes "After six years in the making, the Arduino Due is finally becoming available and, with a price tag of $49, is bound to give a boost to the platform. The Due, which means 2 in Italian and is pronounced 'doo-eh', replaces the 8-bit, 16MHz Uno by a 32-bit, 84MHz processor board that also has a range of new features — more memory, a USB port that allows it to pretend to be a mouse or a keyboard say, 54 I/O pins and so on — but what lets you do more with it is its speed and power. The heart of the new Arduino Due is the Atmel SAM3X8E, an ARM Cortex-M3-based processor, which gives it a huge boost in ADC performance, opening up possibilities for designers. The theoretical sampling rate has gone from the 15 ksps (kilosamples per second) of the existing boards, the Arduino Uno, Leonardo, and Mega 2560, to a whopping 1,000 ksps. What this all means is that the Due can be used for much more sophisticated applications. It can even play back WAV files without any help. Look out for the Due in projects that once would have needed something more like a desktop machine."
Re:Unfortunately for Arduino (Score:5, Insightful)
The Pi isn't a microcontroller. Will you people stop equating them. They're tiny and they're boards but one is not the other.
As far as the LaunchPad. I'd love to try it out but they've so heavily tied to their Windows GUI that it makes it hard to work on anything else.
The nice thing about the Arduino is that I can quickly write a sketch to do analog and digital IO. Yes I know how to read spec sheets and setup all the registers to control the pins but the Arduino abstracts all that. I setup pin 13 to do output then just digitalWrite the pin high or low. Same with interrupts.
Re:Unfortunately for Arduino (Score:5, Insightful)
If all hammers were the same price, I'd pick the sledge hammer.
Not a paleontologist, then.
MIssing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
The point that everyone - manufacturers and users alike - seem to be missing is the toolchain.
The popularity of the original Arduino was entirely due to the free IDE released by Atmel for their chips. Since then many other companies have released micro boards hoping to hop on the bandwagon, mostly with little success.
Micro boards have been available since the 1980s. I've personally used 68HC11 single-board computers ($50 each) in that era for personal projects. They are programmed in assembler, because the C compiler can cost several thousands of dollars - upwards of $10,000 depending on vendor and capabilities.
Look through back-issues of Hackaday [hackaday.com] to see all the neat, new single-board computers which have been released - none of them rise to the popularity of the Arduino.
Open source enthusiasts may mention that you can use GCC, but that's a compiler not a toolchain. Open-source tools require an investment of learning and trial-and-error to get things working correctly, and most of the time it's a large investment that people don't want to make. The standard practice for open source is to find a tutorial, follow every step, and then google for answers when it doesn't work.
When the [whatever other board you happen to like] comes with a plug-and-play IDE that lets developers concentrate on the code instead of getting the code onto the board, then you'll have something.
Re:Why Arduino again? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll tell you 'why arduino': its the community, the examples, the help, the web blogs that have snippets you need to integrate and get a product working, fast.
THAT's why.
its not about the chip. there were always better chips.
the abstraction, community support is what makes the system a winner.