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."
Bug (Score:5, Funny)
The only question I have is, have they fixed the problem with the chameleon circuit? Because otherwise, all I can build with it is a big blue box. -- Some madman
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worse: the mega 2560 shipped with a REALLY bad bootloader. if you happened to have the 'wrong' sequence of binary data in your compiled sketch, the BL would enter monitor mode, almost like the hold hayes modems would on +++.
ie, the geniuses didn't even think that an escape seq NEEDS a delay after the last char. doh!
and so, large sketches and ones with this seq in them, either in string or binary form, will cause upload failures.
probably even to this day, half a year or more later, the mega ships with this
Unfortunately for Arduino (Score:1, Informative)
The TI Stellaris Launchpad ($5, free shipping, 80 MHz) and Raspberry Pi ($30, 700 MHz) beat the living hell out of the Due on price and processing power
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, Interesting)
Re:Unfortunately for Arduino (Score:5, Insightful)
If all hammers were the same price, I'd pick the sledge hammer.
Not a paleontologist, then.
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If all hammers were the same price, I'd pick the sledge hammer.
Not a paleontologist, then.
or a neurologist
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Or any doctor doing that tappy knee thing.
You might feel a slight shattering sensation...
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For some jobs, you need a tack hammer, even if it costs the same as a sledgehammer. And sometimes you want a nail gun. It's good that we've got a lot of tools to choose from.
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Wait a minute. I don't get it. Is a tack hammer some kind of new car?
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For some jobs, you need a tack hammer, even if it costs the same as a sledgehammer. And sometimes you want a nail gun.
Particularly if there's zombies around. A tack hammer barely slows them down.
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The Pi can't accomplish the same tasks though. In fact, I don't think you can even run code that has relatively relaxed soft real time requirements on it (such as, say, controlling a 3D printer or CNC mill) because its SD card and USB drivers do horrible things to interrupt latency. A desktop PC might actually be more capable of accomplishing some traditional microcontroller tasks than the Pi.
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Given that USB runs on a fixed schedule like any hard-realtime PLC would, and doesn't require any excessive interrupt-time processing, I don't have the slightest idea WTF you're after. FUD much? If you're transmitting via USB to, say, any FTDI chip, then it's quite trivial to update the outputs on a rock solid 1ms timebase (or an integer multiple of that period). Given that, it's quite easy to maintain streaming for various bit-bang modes that modern FTDI chips support.
Re:Unfortunately for Arduino (Score:4, Informative)
Normal USB doesn't require excessive interrupt-time processing. The USB controller on the Raspberry Pi, on the other hand, implements most of the USB controller functionality in software and was taking up something like 15% of the CPU time just in USB-related interrupt handling before they optimized the driver - even if you weren't actively using USB! Also, it turns out that the Pi has trouble meeting the real-time requirements of its USB controller too because the SD card driver causes excessive interrupt latency. This was one of the reasons why people had so many problems with USB devices on the Pi.
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Someone messed up with that SD controller driver -- they must have had no clue what they were doing. Seriously. I mean, give me a break, Linux has very nice high resolution kernel timers, you can pretty much schedule your driver to resume some time later with microsecond resolution and quite good repeatability. Never mind that with USB everything is done in chunks that are paced by the frame metronome at 1ms. There is no reason to react at any other time base but that of the USB frame, because no matter wha
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The Pi was never intended to meet RT constraints. Though, when they get all the problems ironed out of the drivers, it might not be too bad for ~10ms latency applications. If you want RT response from a PI-based system you add a daughter board hanging off the GPIO to handle the RT stuff and do your executive/UI/visualization stuff on the PI. In fact it is quite reasonable to hang an Arduino off the PI-GPIO and set up a rather powerful embedded system for dirt cheap.
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Your analogy undermines your argument. In fact hammers are, more or less, to within an order of magnitude, the same price, but there are lots of different types. You wouldn't pick a sledgehammer if you could have only one, and the task at hand was driving small nails or doing fine work. I own about five different hammers, they all get used on very different jobs.
I'd pick the right microcontroller for a job likewise. This looks like a good
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The Pi runs a RTOS? The M3 the Due runs has a port of FreeRTOS.
I'd put the Due in my car to run it. I'd put the Pi in to run the stereo. Because the last thing I want when going down the highway is the ethernet subsystem decide it needs to hiccup and the subsystem to fire the spark fails.
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The Pi does have a port [stevebate.net] of ChibiOS/RT [chibios.org].
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If all hammers were the same price, I'd pick the sledge hammer.
Would you really? The sledgehammer is great when you want to apply a lot of force but it's going to be a disaster for many jobs because of lack of precision, it's also likely to be very tiring to use.
So it is for the Pi, In terms of raw CPU grunt it easily beats microcontroller based boards and having a linux environment, an ethernet interface and plenty of memory means you can do things like web interfaces easily and well for moderate user loads. However that comes at a price. Latencies will be much higher
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No, it's a pretty good example, human power is still power. Try using a sledgehammer to shingle a roof or install hardwood flooring and you will quickly understand how important power consumption can be (while the guy with the purpose-built hammer is still going strong, and the guy with the nail driver is already finished).
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> The Pi is the best microcontroller on the planet for certain applications.
No. no it is not. The guy that designed the BrewPi [brewpi.com] doesn't even use the Pi to control the low level PID. It's not stable enough. He uses a real microcontroller at the bare level and the PI is pretty much just a debian computer running rrdtool and the web front end.
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It's a proto tool. You never leave a Due where you design it for. You figure out how slow of a processor you can get away with. You figure out how much IO you really need and you get the smallest Atmel or TI chip that supports that.
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Not really, it's mostly a hobbyist tool. People who use Arduino's *often* leave it where it was designed in.
If you are a company who is going to mass produce a product and buy lots of Atmel or TI chips you can just get the Atmel or TI reference kits.
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the Pi IS a microcontroller. Just ask the company that sells them.
Just because by your definition it's not does not change the fact that the rest of the world considers any of the cellphone processors to be microcontrollers.
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I think the difference in this context is microcontroller vs microprocessor.
Microcontroller doesn't run a OS, a microprocessor does.
On a Arduino you are running on bare metal. On the Pi you are running on Linux.
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The Pi has an SoC based on an ARM core with cache, MMU, DMA, multimedia co-processor, and GPU w/ 3D support. *That's* the reason it's a "System on a Chip" and not a microcontroller, not the software that happens to run on it...
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Well you could run code on the bare metal and in that case it would function very similar to the Arduino. You could nearly make the code fairly compatible.
Because that isn't the recommended way to operate it however, I think that is the biggest difference. Like running a x86 on the bare metal.
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Yeah, that's my point... running DOS on an x86 doesn't make it a microcontroller ;)
But in fact your statement is not really true anyway - so start, the BCM SoC uses DRAM (and has a cache, and MMU, etc) which requires a fair bit of setup, etc, compared to the SRAM on the Arduino. And all of the peripherals are completely different. "Running on bare metal" means the code (at some level) is not abstracted by an OS so you have to deal with the differences yourself, making it very NON compatible...
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The Pi is just a Broadcom 2835 on a PCB with a bunch of connectors. I have worked with half a dozen BRCM SoCs over more than a decade and no one has *ever* called them "microcontrollers".
It's all silly semantics anyway, but if you want to go with industry convention (which defines the silly semantics) no, the rest of the (professional) world does not consider them to be microcontrollers.
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Re:Unfortunately for Arduino (Score:4, Informative)
Stellaris LaunchPad is out of its intro pricing now, and costs $13, but that's still a hell of a lot cheaper than $49!!
Stellaris is Cortex-M4F, not Cortex-M3, so it's better suited for DSP and math operations (built-in floating point unit) too...
Re:Unfortunately for Arduino (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair, the Stellaris Launchpad is obviously a loss leader. The earlier MSP430 Launchpad never really gained a foothold in the hobbyist community despite its low price, so it remains to be seen how TI will manage this time around. Perhaps they don't care.
Re:Unfortunately for Arduino (Score:5, Informative)
They certainly tried, and I personally looked at the MSP430 launchpad as a fun distraction last spring ... and ended up ditching Arduino altogether, seeing as most of my projects didn't need the space. What TI was missing was Arduino's IDE, as hideous as it sounds, but they have it now--in the form of Energia (http://www.energia.nu). Still not as established as Arduino though.
Another big hit was the chips they released initially--the 1st gen "value line" chips were hideously underpowered, like 2KB flash/128 bytes of SRAM, more ATTiny-like in size. The current "v1.5" LaunchPad you buy comes with 3rd-gen value line parts, up to 16KB flash, still not quite arduino but doing a lot better (and with hardware UART).
I hope the Stellaris LaunchPad catches on quicker, it looks like OpenOCD is starting to work with it so I have high hopes a UNIX-based environment can be easily deployed for Stellaris development soon. What I am personally more impressed with is the LaunchPad's BoosterPack form factor ( http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/BYOB )--they have thought of a simple and straightforward way to expand the capabilities, while retaining (in theory) some backwards compatibility with boosterpacks made for the MSP430 for example. Much nicer than Arduino's "shield" layout IMO.
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Thanks for the tip about Energia. My old robotics club bought a bunch of MSP430 Launchpads when they came out, but the software side of the equation was definitely lacking, especially for cross-platform development.
I'm also excited about the Stellaris Launchpad and hope that an open source command-line workflow will be developed. Should be fun.
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Because the MSP430 was a complete Pain in the ass to use.
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$5 is insanely cheap. I just bought one and have no idea what I'm going to use it for. Looking forward to it though!
Re:Unfortunately for Arduino (Score:4, Interesting)
You shoud try Microchip PIC's then. $1.95 makes $5.00 look like a overpriced piece.
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Yes, PIC's are cheap, but have an absolutely hideous instruction set.
I'll take an Atmel processor any day, even if the cost is 75 cents more.
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Only if you program them in assembler. There is a giant C library out there for them.
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35 command instruction set. talk about a REAL RISC machine.
that said, I've got the entire instruction set memorized.
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Will you please provide a link to the $1.95 developer board? I'm only finding PIC chips for that price and not a full boards like the Launchpads & Arduinos.
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The TI Stellaris Launchpad ($5, free shipping, 80 MHz) and Raspberry Pi ($30, 700 MHz) beat the living hell out of the Due on price and processing power
Launchpads are $13 now, Pi was always $32-39 ($42 if you order from Poland)
Amazing to see how many don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
The Arduino was never about price or performance. If you really want a led display, you can get fastly more powerfull and usuable device by simply buying a dedicated device. Same for a remote control robot, even programmable ones.
But with an Arduino even those NOT blessed with a background in electronics could make it work. There are even interfaces for it where you program it completely through a icon interface like this http://www.electronics-lab.com/blog/?p=5865 [electronics-lab.com]
Yes, there are more powerful devices out there, there are cheapers devices there are even more powerful AND cheaper devices out there. And they ALL didn't succeed to even come close to the support Arduino had. Even if you have no programming experience and never messed around with a battery and a led, the Arduino community is able and willing to give you a hand.
It is the difference between Ubuntu and Debian, between Linux and BSD, between PHP and Python. Sure, the "experts" look down on it, but the first are the stuff that gets used by noobs who might or might not become experts (if they even have a desire too) while the second are the stuff people TELL you you must use before they even consider talking to you.
I know some people who never coded anything yet messed around with Arduino after buying a kit and did some silly little projects that won't amaze anyone bit it was fun for them, not unlike the electronic kits you could buy when I was a kid. Sure sure, if you all did it from scratch with a soldering iron, you no doubt ended up a much better kind of human being but us mere dregs had to make due with simpler tools. And get things done.
When it comes time for you to move on, as you outgrow the Arduino, you can go for the more specialist tools and hopefully overcome the lack of manuals and guides. But some people need the training wheels and sneering at them is only get you complete and utter contempt from all the non-pricks in this world.
Like I have utter contempt for a person who lists as an alternative a board that isn't available at the stated price anymore and another board that has a shipping time of anywhere from a week to a month depending on what the supplier feels like and neither has anywhere near the 3rd party support.
Let me know when I can give away an arduino kit and have someone make something immediatly even if it is as trivial as a led lighting up to a light sensor but THEY did it, themselves and get that makers spirit burning in another product that is both as forgiving AND as flexible, THEN you can come back.
No doubt people like taktoa scoff at childrens books too because for less you can buy great literature, in latin!
Re:Amazing to see how many don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
I got an Arduino Uno starter kit 6 months ago. Then a PIC based flyport (with Wifi). Then an Atmega32u4 based Teensy 2.0. Last week I even got a Parallax Propeller, also very interesting.
Last year I hardly knew how to hold a soldering iron, now I'm having smd and through hole PCB's made of my own design in China and I'm planning on controlling various parts of my home with them.
I'm a software engineer by trade, but I'm really starting to enjoy this hardware thing. Thanks to Arduino and its competitors there's lots and lots of info out on the web to lift a complete newbie up to a surprising (to me) level.
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Wow. I wrote one sentence that was a statement of fact, and you responded with a diatribe on how wrong I am. Notice that I said "beats the hell out of the Arduino on price and processing power". I said absolutely nothing about ease of use, community support, or software compatibility.
FWIW, I think the Arduino platform is pretty great, but pricing the board at $50 is utter bullshit. What I would really like is a POSIX-type API that allows anyone to make a layer between Arduino code and the microprocessor of
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You're the person that Arduino was made for. Programmed with a usb cable and plenty of explanations of what went wrong (and online documentation on how to fix it).
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The Raspberry Pi has at least 17 pins available for I/O and the Rev 2 boards have 4 additional I/O pins.
For reference:
http://elinux.org/RPi_Low-level_peripherals#GPIO_hardware_hacking [elinux.org]
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and has horrid support, an IDE that gets you a saleman phonecall every fucking month, missing libraries, a clusterfuck of a website to navigate and clowns who dont even know what they are shipping on the disk they gave you
I dont like anything that has to do with TI or ARM, might as well just shit in my hand, its just as useful.
Don't need a desktop (Score:2)
Look out for the Due in projects that once would have needed something more like a desktop machine
There are a lot of microcontrollers that bridge the gap between a 16MHz Arduino and a desktop machine.
WAV ? (Score:5, Interesting)
"It can even play back WAV files without any help."
Well, ZPUino [alvie.com] does this for a long time (14.4KHz, stereo, and more), and it's also opensource (actually, BSD for hardware, and GPLv2/v3 for software). Runs at 96MHz, and it's fully customizable (even the chip is customizable: see SoundPuddle [slashdot.org] for example, or the Rectrocade synth) [kickstarter.com].
What Arduino users were actually expecting (well, I was), was a proper IDE. I don't think writing proper applications for the Due platform with current Processing IDE is feasible. So far everyone has been quiet about this (there were rumours other IDE would be on the forge).
But the price tag is indeed attractive.
Alvie
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If you want to write proper programs, forget about using the Arduino libraries and IDE and just use a real one instead. There are several for AVR. It is probably the most widely supported microcontroller architecture.
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It can't be the IDE.
If it was, then other more powerful Arduino-like products such as Digilent's ChipKit [digilentinc.com] would have taken the market by storm... Arduino IDE, Arduino form-factor, 80 Mhz 32-bit MIPS CPU, 512K Flash. 32K SRAM, 42 I/Os, works just like a really fast 3.3V Arduino for $35. I've got one, and they are all that they say they are, but somehow they just are not Arduino,
I suspect the "Due" will somehow be "just not Ardunio" too.
Maybe there is a herding mentality where the first thing people ask the
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is the pi better
Depends on what you are trying to do.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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So the community identified the problem and that is it's weakness?
Admittedly there's no helping some people who are way out of their depth but they were right. If she's overloaded the I/O requirement of the simple Arduino system then the best community couldn't help her, not without breaking out some serious electrical magic which she likely isn't capable of give she's picked the wrong system to begin with.
Now imagine if she didn't have a project that was out of league. There's a reason her artist friends h
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She got frustrated because it was nowhere near as easy as she was told it would be (Not having basic understanding of circuits is a critical limitation).
If you don't understand or want to learn electronics, Arduino is not for you.
Sure there are lots of cool programs out there, but putting two or more of them together is not practical because of the boards limitations. Using any one of them by itself, it would be cheaper to buy a commercial product to do just that one function (No tinkering necessary).
And that is where Raspberry Pi comes in. You can buy USB dongles and hang them off of it and access them with high level programs running on a complete operating system, even including the development system on the device if you want, or not. And it's cheaper than this device, to boot. The Arduino seems like more of a PLC today than anything else. I'm struggling to figure out what it's good for though. Everything I want to talk to
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Yeah. call me when you have one of those this small...
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10999 [sparkfun.com]
I am integrating this stuff into insane tiny things and making a mint. Steampunk people have a buttload of money and when you make something that "works" they will pay any price for it. no other platform has a drop in and go board this small and this cheap that has so many libraries that I don't even have to write a program, most of what I look for is already done.
Anyone can do a monster board... Give me the
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Every time I go to sparkfun I'm amazed by how much they overcharge. That's about $5 of parts in small quantity, and very little assembly. Nice margin.
Definitely a fan of the AVRs with hardware USB... I've been using them for everything lately.
Pmods are EXPENSIVE. (Score:2)
I looked this over, and while the starter $40 board looks comparable, the Pmods are all overly expensive compared to the Arduino. I also don't see any built it yourself kits for a fraction of the cost? Perhaps if you want to point out something "better", next time try posting something that is, you know, actually better.
How many adc? (Score:1)
TFA mentions 12-bit ADCs but appears to have a blank space in the spec chart. I`m also wondering what it has for timers.
With all of that speed and I/O it seems like this could be a better and cheaper board to use in place of Megasquirt for fuel injection. It would need the software written for it and it would need power transistors, etc. but for $49 damn! The lowliest Megasquirt board costs over $100 in kit form and the Megasquirt 3 which has comparable CPU speed is $400 or more if I remember right.
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http://www.atmel.com/Images/doc11057s.pdf [atmel.com]
16ch 12bit ADC (which, like on the old ones, is really a multiplexer on a single ADC).
2ch 16b DAC
9 32b timers
+1 32b timer for real time clock (presumably has 32768 crystal input, divided down, and runs at one second realtime)
Also has a bunch of UART/I2C/SPI channels, CAN, USB host/device, high speed SD card interface, ethernet MAC, ext. bus (for flash, etc).
etc
A bit expensive? (Score:4, Informative)
And how do you plug a led straight into that (Score:4, Interesting)
You just don't get it, what made the Arduino so popular is that you could do things with it straight out of the box, without first having to solder on pins like the cheapest Teensy. Just put in a led, write some simple code and the Arduino ran. That is what sold it. The arduino is something a kid could take to work for show and tell and that I find an amazing idea in this day and age when most kids are raised with black boxes.
All the experts and people that knew what they were doing could already buy all the electronics they wanted and put it together, the Arduino filled no gap for them, it was for all the people who aren't experts that this kit exists. For all those who want to try their hand at it but don't have the patience and/or knowledge to start messing about with setting up something completely from spare parts. The Arduino is a kit just a tiny bit under the electronic kits sold in toy stores. The teensy would be sold in a hobby store. Different level. Some devices help people cross over. That is why Lego is so immensly powerful, sure, you can make far better stuff with raw material and a toolset but it helps people get started.
And it doesn't help anyone get started if all the "experts" sneer at the choice of starter tools. It is the reason makers areas succeed or fail by the attitude of their founders. Some can be really hostile to any newby who comes in all excited but makes the mistake of having only a 9 bucks soldering iron. Oh NO! SHUN HIM!
Meanwhile the maker area's that welcome people are exploding and running out room.
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"All the experts and people that knew what they were doing could already buy all the electronics they wanted and put it together, the Arduino filled no gap for them"
I dunno. I *could* have built a board from sratch, but it's just not worth my time. When people are making arduino compatible clones and LCD breakouts for $15 each it's a no brainer, grab their board and concentrate on the rest of the interfacing circuitry.
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The teensy 2.0 is very convenient indeed.
But, what do you know, the teensy now has a new generation 3.0, based on ARM Cortex M4! Just out!
Check this out:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/paulstoffregen/teensy-30-32-bit-arm-cortex-m4-usable-in-arduino-a [kickstarter.com]
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Now if only we could get a multiplexing shield for the Arduino. oh wait! [mayhewlabs.com]
I think you've missed the point. Please show me a large plethora of "shield" to expand the functionality of the teensy in a plug and play fashion. e.g. off the top of my head I want to create a project to interface via ethernet, GPS, and 3G. There's an off the shelf solution for this that connects to the I/O pins on the Arduino to achieve just this. What's available for the Teensy without needing a soldering iron?
For the record I don't
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.
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A related point: Even when a board comes with a GCC toolchain /w Eclipse and whatnot (like the Stellaris dev. kits), it's often overly complicated and voodoo-ish to get everything installed and configured.
I would like to think that a simple (?) embedded board could be made to work with similar or less effort than setting up e.g. a basic C compiler or assembler in Windows or Linux.
Here's my ideal recipe, which I have never seen any vendor try to follow:
- One compiler binary: 'compiler.exe'.
- One set of C run
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Hmm, then get an Arduino? Because that's essentially its build process. Run avr-gcc to compile and build, avr-objcopy to convert the binary to an hex file, then avrdude to flash the uC. Done!
https://balau82.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/programming-arduino-uno-in-pure-c/ [wordpress.com]
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I would argue that the toolchain is only half of the story. The other half is shields. And they just changed the voltage... cha cha cha
Still light on RAM (Score:2)
It's an ARM CPU, but with only 96KB of RAM. That's very small for a CPU of that power.
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It's an ARM CPU, but with only 96KB of RAM. That's very small for a CPU of that power.
Not for a Cortex-M3 it isn't. This isn't a high-end application processor like they have in the iPhone. 96 kB of SRAM is a lot for a microcontroller.
uhh hmm... (Score:2)
Do we need "more powerful" embedded devices, or do we need smaller, more efficient devices?
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yes
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More powerful, as it stands an arduino can only marginally deal with a tcp/ip stack. Getting IPv6 running on one works but with a pile of limitations. Making blinky lights is fun and all but the real power comes from making them communicate.
Learn English... (Score:1)
Damn Americans.
"replaces the 8-bit, 16MHz Uno BY a 32-bit, 84MHz processor"
It's "replaces... WITH a 32-bit, 84MHz processor".
micro USB (Score:2)
It acts as a host though a microUSB. And exactly how many mice, keyboards, memory-sticks etc use that?
So it looks like the first job on getting one would be to de-solder the socket and try and replace it with a full size USB.
Re: (Score:1)
Why not use a Micro-USB to USB OTG Adapter Cable [cellphoneshop.net]?
Re: (Score:2)
Mice don't have USB ports either, because they have an integral cable. MicroUSB is the best way to put a non-fixed USB interface on a small device.
Not bad, but... Teensy3.0 is also nice. (Score:2)
Once again Arduino has taken a nice chip and cut off it's legs while mounting it on an compatible platform. It looks like almost half of the Due CPU's available IO pins are NOT accessible on the board (unless you are good at soldering fine wire to .4mm spaced pins by hand). They did the same thing on the Arduino Mega with the atmega1280 and atmega2560 parts (leaving out at least 16 of the IO pins, including the XCK signals so you CAN'T use the usarts in SPI mode!).
If you want to go ARM, you might consider
Still has the freaking retarded pin spacing (Score:1)
Seriously .... FIX THE FUCKING PIN SPACING YOU ASSHOLES.
I know thats going to kill what little karma I have, but for fucks sake the pin spacing the digital pins with that nice little nonstandard gap is freaking obnoxious to all hell and back making it practically impossible to use with say .... a normal freaking prototyping board.
Yes, it will break shield compatibility but it'll make it work with all sorts of other non-Arduino boards and moving forward the damn shields will be fixed too.
No, I didn't use eno
Re: (Score:1)
I'd be curious to know why they've all got Italian names
My guess is because it started as a project in Italy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino#History [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:1)
STM32F4-Discovery is what I've been using for around a year.
Excellent board!