Why the Arduino Won and Why It's Here To Stay 224
ptorrone writes "For years, students, journalists, makers and old-school engineers have asked why the Arduino open source microcontroller platform has taken off, with over 100k units 'in the wild' — it's the platform of choice for many. MAKE's new column discusses why the Arduino has become so popular and why it's here to stay. And for anyone wanting to build an 'Arduino killer' (there are many) — MAKE outlines what they'll need to do."
Agree, mostly. (Score:2)
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It did start off well. Two things that detract from it. The forum has people who drive off new users of Arduino and they will not regulate them or get rid of them.
The last batch of 'genuine' Arduino boards had atrocious quality control problems for the amount of money they cost. I bought the Uno and latest Mega and the solder work on the headers is very poor and the edges of the PCB had not been sanded in any way so had fiberglass fuzz. They work and function well. I am looking for a more affordable substit
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Re:Agree, mostly. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've worked with
Re:Agree, mostly. (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate anything M$" is hardly a meaningful or valid reason.
Unless you rephrase it as "I don't want to get locked into Microsoft products again, since I had a bad experience last time.".
Seems meaningful and valid.
Re:Agree, mostly. (Score:4, Insightful)
Another reason is, "I want to target platforms Microsoft doesn't."
Say what you will about Oracle, but with OpenJDK, I can pretty much do what I want. The closes thing .NET has is Mono, which means you're basically castrating the feature set of .NET, whereas OpenJDK includes almost all of the Sun JDK, and is almost always out-of-the-box compatible.
Or I can write my code in JRuby, which means I run anywhere Java does and anywhere CRuby does, as well as anywhere anyone writes a Ruby interpreter in the future.
Platforms that run only .NET bytecode (Score:2)
Say what you will about Oracle, but with OpenJDK, I can pretty much do what I want.
Except run on platforms that run verifiably type-safe .NET IL and nothing else. These platforms include at least Xbox Live Indie Games, the only set-top video game platform that officially allows micro-ISVs to develop and sell games for it, and Windows Phone 7. Say I want to write a video game whose physics and AI are shared among all platforms [pineight.com] even if it has a separate graphics engine per platform. Can the Java programming language be compiled to IL, or just to JVM bytecode?
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Can the Java programming language be compiled to IL, or just to JVM bytecode?
The Java programming language can be compiled to IL.
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Except run on platforms that run verifiably type-safe .NET IL and nothing else.
Except platforms that Microsoft has locked down to only run code written in .Net, yes. Of course, there are also platforms out there that only run Java code...
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Real reasons to dislike .NET are few and far between
Not true in the least. Such an opinion is hinting at your own bias. Realistically, .net is not portable and outside a subject of the Microsoft economy.
Now if you want to rephrase with such a caveat, I certainly won't disagree. But once you're looking at developers who prefer not to be forced to develop only on and only for Windows, there really doesn't exist a reason to like .net at all.
And before we go astray, while interesting, Mono is not a replacement for .net and it in of itself has its own shortcoming
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"I hate anything M$" is hardly a meaningful or valid reason.
Oh yes, it is!
I find it immoral to give any additional mindshare to Microsoft, no matter what it is about.
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I have nothing MS in my house, nor do I intend to just give them money, why would I want to use .NET?
Because Sony and Nintendo are even more restrictive than Microsoft. I thought I discussed this with you in other articles.
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That is not an independent implementation, it is done by novell at the behest of MS. It's a trap.
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Great! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Great! (Score:4, Interesting)
If it's just cheap and affordable you're looking for, take a look at the MSP430 LaunchPad [ti.com]. Less than $5.
Getting the crystal in is less than fun, but still, that's one cheap board.
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Before that, I got the $20 Ez430-USB sticks. And then the RF ones.
The biggest issue I've found is that the readily available cheap MSP430 chips all need four wire programming and the cheap development kits have Spy-Wire two-wire programming. I ordered a dozen of the MSP430x1xx series to do a project and found out that I couldn't use the USB stick (or La
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Of course, that's for the MSP430 equivalent of an ATTiny chip. If you want something with the same code capacity and I/O support of the ATmega328 in the Arduino, not only do you have to buy a new MSP430 chip and a programmer for it, but you also have to pay for the development environment because the version with the MSP430 LaunchPad is artificially limited in code size. There are two options: Code Composer Studio ($500 for a single-computer license) and IAR Embedded Workbench (pricing only available on req
lol wut (Score:2)
mspgcc [sourceforge.net] works great for me.
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Obligatory: I actually use gcc and command-line tools (and a plain text editor) for development. That doesn't change what I said above.
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When it comes down to it, an arduino is a $15 minicomputer.
This. I'm using my Arduinos for things that I was planning to do with a few old 486s at one point. And they are far more useful. I can easily write programs in C, with lots of libraries available to make it easy. I don't have to learn proprietary BASIC or assembly or anything goofy. If one breaks (lost one so far -- a chicken pooped on it), I can buy a new one for $20 or use the reference info to repair it. There is a huge community of support, add-ons, and tutorials on controlling and interfacing wit
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"Eggs are ready" sensor, I imagine?
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The PIC was similar (Score:3, Insightful)
There was a time when it was difficult and expensive to develop embedded applications. Then MicroChip came out with the PIC. The tools were free. There was lots of helpful documentation. You could build a PIC programmer out of junk box parts.
If you were a small developer, you wouldn't bother with a company like Philips (and the others) whose tools were expensive and whose documentation was Byzantine.
Arduino is one step better. It was designed to be used by artists. There are tutorials for everything. It is SO easy to use.
Of course, Arduino isn't a chip, it's a little board. The chip is Atmel's AVR. I don't know what Atmel did to deserve their good luck. I'm guessing that the hard work of the Arduino folks has really increased Atmel's market share.
The lesson here is that it isn't the goodness of the chip. (The early PICs were really unfriendly to C compilers.) You can have the best chip in the world but nobody will use it if they aren't properly supported.
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Considering Atmel sells millions of chips a year to industrial clients and less than 500k chips total to Arduino and Knockoffduino makers, not all that much.
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Yup. I recently used the old Cypress PSoC that I had lying around. This is a COOL chip. It has a plethora of analog block which can be configured as an ADC, DAC, filter, amplifier, etc. It also has configurable digital blocks which can be used as SPI, serial port, PWM outputs, timers, etc. Very configurable with LOT of cool options on-chip.
However, it was a bit of a pain to program an ISR. I could see how t
Re:The PIC was similar (Score:4, Informative)
In the mid 80's there was the Intel 8052-BASIC chip. [lvr.com] It had a decent integer BASIC with serial interactive I/O and could, with the proper 21(ish) VDC, burn EPROMs. I designed and manufactured a COCOT payphone [wikipedia.org] using it. Quite the fun thing to play with.
Using a Dallas Smartsocket JEDIC socket with a 6564 SRAM chip made a great development environment.
This was back in the mid-80s. This has better speed and Ethernet, but for the decades that have past, not anything astoundingly new.
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The chip is Atmel's AVR. I don't know what Atmel did to deserve their good luck.
They designed a chip that was cheap, fast, and was very easy to write a C compiler for. Someone wrote a very good open source toolchain for it. The rest was inevitable. (Some of the newer dsPIC ranges have a gcc-based compiler written by Microchip themselves, but the optimizer and standard libraries are closed source.)
ArmMite (Score:3)
Arduino "Uno" (Score:5, Informative)
Arduino is the project, Uno is the board. There's actually a few other boards they've created: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Hardware [arduino.cc]
If you like them you may also want to checkout many of the other microcontrollers in a Digikey or Mouser catalog. I collect them myself. Everything from PIC to Atmel-based, to Zigbee. They're all quite fun.
The main advantage of the Arduino is it's open source design. The other controllers are not as customizable _before_ production. With arduino you can add things if you need them on board.
The real reason it won ... (Score:2)
All the reasons the guy listed for why the Arduino 'wins' are not unique to the devices. You can get all of those same things out of a radio shack basic stamp.
Arduino won because the stuck a decent microcontroller on a solid board (I'm ignoring the absolutely retarded pin spacing issue that pisses everyone off) at a decent price with a serial boot loader already burned to the chip. The ATmega chips were popular long before Arduino, so when it came out suddenly all of us who had been futzing around with AT
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To be honest, I think you're giving Arduino a little less credit than it deserves. It's not just popular just because it uses the ATmega. It's popular because it greatly simplifies the whole process from start to end. If you're concerned with bloat in the various libraries, then why don't you fix them? They're not binary blobs. The people who made Arduino are not the ones who released every library for it. It's a community of developers sharing their work.
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and the standardization allows easy sharing of people's programs.
^^^ This. I've done open-source PIC projects, but they're not that accessible, and consequently, hardly anyone uses them. "How do I replicate your cool project?" "Well, first you have to spin a board, I know this guy in China who will etch them for $80...you know how to solder, right? Budget the first 8 hours or so for getting the toolchain working. Now, go on Digikey and..."
I think one thing that drives Arduino to the level of success it enjo
Immaculate Timing (Score:5, Informative)
I literally just opened the box of my first Arduino board about 15 minutes ago. I installed the IDE, plugged it into my computer, loaded the drivers, and sent a few sample programs to the tiny board with -zero- problems.
With an out-of-the-box experience like that, it's no wonder the darn thing is so popular.
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Well, thanks for the review. I've been wanting to start doing some hobby electronics for some time now; haven't been sure how to start with it. A few years ago, I'm sure I would have started with something like a PIC, but my fear is that I'd spend my short supply of dollars on something and then discover that I'm missing a half-dozen parts even before I start screwing around with it.
Radio Shack has the extras you'll need later (Score:2)
I ended up ordering about $100 worth of stuff including the basic Arduino, breadboards, and random things to plug in to them,. but once I got started, I've found that Radio Shack actually still carries electronic components! (:-) It's only about 5 feet of their shelf space, but the standard store has a bunch of drawers of LEDs, resistors, capacitors, alligator clips, a few simple ICs like 555s and op-amps, etc., and they've got another few feet of wall space with breadboards and soldering irons and such.
O
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Really, any dev kit from any half-way decent company will be just as painless to jump into. The difference is that the Arduino is so much cheaper than professional dev kits. While EEs who like to tinker in their spare time (like me) might not mind shelling out $250 for a versatile kit, novices (or people who don't need the extra muscle) are understandably put off.
The Arduino fills that niche, and is much nicer to work with than the old basic stamps I had to put up with in college.
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Thats it. Exactly. No problems, even if you run Linux (and many other IDEs delivered with MCs are either crippled to sell you the $4000 professional development kit or have esoteric demands in OS)
The other thing is: simplicity; you can do a $10 "alarma clock project" up to a $200 bluetooth+gsm tracking project with the same HW.
What i dont like is that they could support the Reneas M16C (because of the nice HW inside) or the TI430 series (power) But
The Arduino won? (Score:2)
There are lots of microcontrollers and boards out there: Basic Stamps, PICs, 68HC11s, Parallax Propellors. You can get some for as little as $3 each. There's probably more stuff out there for Basic Stamps than for the Arduino. There's definitely more PIC related stuff.
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I wondered about that. 100K units is winning?
I sense that Arduino is awesome, don't get me wrong. If I were undertaking an embedded microprocessor project right now, I suspect I'd base it on an Arduino's architecture. But what, exactly, is "winning"? If it's a victory, who is it over? Or is it more of a "everyone wins, we just win differently" kind of victory?
All things considered, TFA smells like something between "hype" and "slashvertising".
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The Arduino won? I didn't even know there was a contest! There are lots of microcontrollers and boards out there: Basic Stamps, PICs, 68HC11s, Parallax Propellors. You can get some for as little as $3 each. There's probably more stuff out there for Basic Stamps than for the Arduino. There's definitely more PIC related stuff.
Basic stamps and PICs used to get a lot of usage in hobbyist projects, but that has changed in the last couple of years. First it started shifting from PIC to Atmel, and then to the (Atmel based) Arduino. It's been a while since I've seen a new project that someone had chosen PIC for.
IMHO the move to Atmle may have been partially due to the PICs super annoying architecture (bank switching for every other operation, for starters). The Arduino of course has a big advantage for people who don't want (or can'
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How much of it is open source? So if you want, you can buy all the components from the local bits and pieces store and solder the board together yourself?
How much of it quickly, simply, and easily installs onto Linux, Macs, and PCs with almost no trouble? (Hell, I can't even get most my desktop hardware to do that one).
How much of it is used
code availability and easy user interface (Score:4, Insightful)
And once a lot of people were using it, they all started releasing their code. Sure there are other great code repositories, PIClist, AVRfreaks, but many of the people there are pretty DIY so they'll exchange snippets of code that they build into something finished. Arduino code is often complete: download this program to do this entire process. That mindset has attracted lots of people, who have contributed even more code, so it benefits from a networking effect, so now anyone who is releasing anything for the electronics experimenter market has to provide an Arduino sketch that handles the hardware being offered -- and that drives it even further.
There are cheaper platforms, there are faster ones, there are ones with much better hardware (and some that are all three, the MSP430 being a likely example) but nothing that combines the simplicity and codebase of the Arduino.
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It won because it's easy. (Score:2)
Context, please (Score:2)
Speaking as someone whose understanding of all this is basically at the level of "I know what a microcontroller is, but don't deal with them much"...
What the heck are we talking about? Neither the summary nor the linked article provides any context to those of us (most of the world's population) that isn't intimately involved with microcontrollers. What does "won" mean, exactly? Is this just a hobbyist platform? Does this dominate all microcontroller applications world-wide?
I shouldn't have to do a dozen Go
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autohovering quadrocopters.
Heck - right there that's all the context I need!
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Great - thank you for the informative post!
A few problems I have had with the Arduino boards (Score:3)
I have tried to use Arduino boards in the past, and while they're really cool for hobbyist stuff, they are very hard to integrate into battery-operated things:
1. The operating voltage is 5V (some may be 3.3V, I forget) and draw a lot of current. Batteries that supply this kind of voltage are HUGE. It would be really nice if they had a design that was optimized for low voltages and low currents, like for mobile sensing, so that I could use coin cells.
2. The devices are really memory-limited. The Uno, which is probably the most popular, has something like 2kB of ram. I used the board to interface with some sensors for tracking a flight trajectory on-board, and I could only record a few seconds of data before running out of room. Wireless transmission wasn't really an option because of power (= more batteries) limitations.
3. Connecting to USB resets the board, wiping the memory, unless you cut a trace on the board. This is supposed to help facilitate loading new programs, but becomes an annoyance if you wanted to use it to transfer sensor data stored on-board to a computer. When you cut the trace to disable the autoreset, it becomes difficult to time the reset button manually so that your program uploads.
Overall, as an EE, I was very impressed at how easy it was to use, but I think the issues I mentioned warrant some fixing if Arduino is going to be used for things like sensing.
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Connecting to USB resets the board, wiping the memory, unless you cut a trace on the board. This is supposed to help facilitate loading new programs, but becomes an annoyance if you wanted to use it to transfer sensor data stored on-board to a computer
Nah they've fixed that, the IDE can still send a reset signal to the board through USB but plugging the USB in certainly doesn't wipe the board anymore, I've used one for data logging via USB enough times and never had any trouble with it.
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1. Make a boost converter. They're super easy. Or buy one as an IC. They cost around $1.
2. You really should use external memory for datalogging, specifically an SD card controlled via SPI.
I don't know about #3, as I don't have much personal experience with them, but that is a nasty design flaw if you're right.
Based on what you mentioned about your project (battery-powered, USB connection, interfacing with sensors, and possibly wireless transmission), I'd actually recommend one of Cypress' PSoC3's. The
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(Disclaimer: tooting own horn.) If you're interested, I recently put together an open-source Arduino variant designed for minimal power consumption [cexx.org] (1uA sleep current, a few mA active) for battery and energyharvesting uses. This variant uses the *PA variant AVRs, which run down to 1.8V, and power is supplied through 'power shields' which can be interchanged for different power sources. It's still an 8-bit AVR, so it won't help you on RAM or processor speed, but it should be more than enough to run a FAT32/m
Low barrier to entry (Score:2)
That's it. No JTAG programmer, no EEPROM burner, no ICSP interface.
Within minutes you can control actual real-world things like you used to be able to do with a parallel port (remember those?)
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Is the hobbyist market _that_ significant? (Score:4, Interesting)
Same goes for Microchip and the PIC family (processors, not development boards). I would expect they are quite happy to cede a few 100k's of chips over the past few years, given that their main business line is everything that has an embedded processor. I doubt they could actually measure the market loss to Arduinos.
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Many people keep doing what they are used to. If a student buys an Arduino as a hobby, there's a good chance that the same person, some years later, will design something based on the same AVR architecture that will end up in a larger volume product.
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But if you can get 100k developers writing for Arduino you have 100k developers that are 97% familiar with Atmel AVR, which is great for Atmel. It's like giving out discounted academic licenses for pricey software programs.
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In a few years you will have an army
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I've heard of researchers using Arduino, presumably because hardware's not their speciality but still they need to get a real demonstration device off the ground quickly as a proof of concept. I can imagine this happening in industry too, so even just as a rapid prototyping / concept proving product it could still have quite significant influence outside of hobby development.
Aaarguino (Score:2)
Not trying to be a hater here, but seriously: you can get a Silicon Labs 8051-based kit, with a micro that has onboard DACs, ADCs, comparators, full-speed USB, and all of the good stuff one gets with an 8051, PLUS the JTAG debug/programming dongle (which Arduino kits DO NOT HAVE) for a hundred bucks [mouser.com].
OK, so the free SiLabs IDE is for Windows only. But they publish the programming interface protocol (C2 for the example '340 device), they fully support SDCC (as well as Keil, IAR and others) in their debugger a
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The 8051 is an ancient piece of crap and it needs to die. Do yourself a favor and get an ARM instead.
and all of the good stuff one gets with an 8051
LOL
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The 8051 is an ancient piece of crap and it needs to die. Do yourself a favor and get an ARM instead.
and all of the good stuff one gets with an 8051
LOL
For a lot of applications, an ARM is overkill. And nobody uses the original 12-clocker Intel 8051s. The SiLabs single-clocker devices are pretty great.
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Instead of 'overkill' you can say 'really powerful', because there is no downside to this 'overkill'. And yes, given the choice between two architectures, I'll take the really powerful one. ARMs are cheap (less than $2 for the cheapest Cortex in low quantities), low power, small size, and have a ton of peripherals. It will let you run high speed USB and 100 Mbps ethernet without a problem.
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When did Arduino or this article about it ever claim to be for people who "do this for a living?"
PS for that $100 you could've made more than 10 Arduino boards, or bought three retail. Its hardly a comparable price.
Anybody still using the Motorola 68HC11? (Score:2)
I remember scouring the suppliers to buy these years ago... collecting the "good ones" with more memory, etc.... saving them for various projects that I never got time for :)
20 years ago the idea of being able to build a little computer into random things around the house for $10 in parts was crazy cool... It's still cool, but less so :)
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PIC ? (Score:2)
So he never heard of the mbed? (Score:2)
I think he never looked at the mbed NXP. Compared to the Arduino, the mbed blows it out of the water. The programming language is C++ and there are tons of great libraries out there. Want to turn some pins into a bus and interface with with old logic components? No problem just include the header file and a line of code that sets up the pins of your choice into a bus that you can now easy read and write to. If your LCD is supported, just wire it in and a simple printf for the lcd library prints to the scree
hmm (Score:2)
100k units? (Score:2)
Umm other platforms installs are counted in the MILLIONS.. how can you call 100k a 'win' ?
The Cool Guy Way To Do it (Score:2)
Order your Microcontrollers for $3-$4 from http://www.digikey.com/
Buy an ISP programmer from Pololu for $20 http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/1300
Download AVR Studio 4 for free from Atmel
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?tool_id=2725
GO
Arduino feels like Linux circa 1995 (Score:4, Interesting)
I got into Arduino last year while looking for interesting toys to play with my kid. Even I got a EE as part of my double CS/EE major 15 years ago, I haven't really done any electronic after college. Arduino provides a quick way to get started. Out of box with easy to use IDE, I can make stuffs entertaining my kid and myself in no time.
The experience getting into Arduino reminds me a lot of the beginning days of Linux. There are more mature commercial options out there (e.g. Solaris, IRIX, even HP/UX) and other competing open source like Net/FreeBSD. Even GNU/Hurd was making progress. But one thing Linux got was a friendly community of beginners. Going through the Arduino forum gave me the same feeling of going through Linux forum back in 95: a lot of excitement about this and willingness to help each other and share. That's defintiely one thing other communities lack. One gets "did you real the source?" reply posting anything to a BSD group.
That's almost parallel to where Arduino is today. There are no lack of better or cheaper alternative but most of them are either established embedded communities or serious lack of documentations. Not friendly at all for the beginners. Arduino gives the beginners a friendly place to get started.
And Arduino goes behind just a AVR based board. It's really a ecosystem with standardized IDE and peripherals. Most people's first critics of Arduino, especially those already in the hardware hacking, is the use of AVR and often cite 8bits and the shortage of AVR last years as problem with Arduino. However, I don't really see that as a short coming of Arduino. I just got a Leaflab's Maple which is a ARM based board with Arduino compatible pin layout and IDE. Getting my projects over to Maple from Arduino is smooth. I don't see Maple as a competitor to Arduino but a member of Arduino family.
The article is right on. There will be a lot of competitors now Arduino is on the spotlight but most of them will fail because they don't get the point of Arduino. It's not about raw CPU power or fine point of the system components, it's about community. And ones don't win the hearts of the community by belittle the community's core.
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Yes (Score:3)
Yes, it does. [wordpress.com]
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Re:Arduino programming language (Score:4, Interesting)
LaunchPad [ti.com] does.
I don't see why this hasn't gotten more fanfare or attention.
A full dev kit costs $4.30. Some of the Arduino stuff I've seen starts at $40. You get 2 chips, a USB programmer, dev environment AND.... a real C environment. Not another language.
It has a ton of other add-ons like the EZ430-CHRONOS [newark.com] watch. After growing up watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit, who hasn't wanted to unlock their doors with Shave and a Haircut. [ziyan.info]
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If you look for something more powerful the STM32VLDISCOVERY http://www.st.com/internet/evalboard/product/250863.jsp [st.com], is a nice alternative at about $10. You get a modern and powerful ARM Coretex M3 with 128 KB Flash and 8 KB RAM. With lots of nice peripherals included.
430: Mindshare, Examples, and Shipping Product (Score:3)
I ordered the Launchpad a week or two after ordering my Arduino, and it took about two months to arrive :-) You're expected to know a bit more about what you're doing to use the MSP430, the programming environment's less friendly, the chip has even less memory, and installing the timer chip on the board requires surface-mount soldering, which is a lot harder to learn than regular through-hole. I'll get around to it in a couple of months, after my Arduino projects. (And the wristwatch version is amazingly
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Sounds almost like a BeagleBoard [beagleboard.org], though that might be overkill compared to what you described.
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The Papilio [cutedigi.com] boards are FPGAs with an Arduino core. You can treat it as an Arduino with remappable pins(PWM wherever you want) or you can stick your own core on it.
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If you want to run a full embedded-linux computer, you pretty much have to go one step further. NSLU2s are discontinued now; but should run you under $100 for an ARM boar
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It would also be nice with a similar system based around an FPGA.
I know that there are some people working on these sorts of ideas, so hopefully something will take off.
Uh, perhaps this board [digilentinc.com] from Digilent? Or this kit [xilinx.com] from Xilinx? Or similar offerings from Altera and Actel?
What am I missing?
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16 will do, 8 will require a bit of effort choosing applications. You CAN cram uClinux into 2M, but you have to know what you're doing to yank ore stuff out of the kernel so it's not for beginners.
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Try a used inkjet/scanner combo with photo SD. That comes with sensors and prewired motor controllers. (see sig, though I haven't done an ARM based one yet, just PPC which are usually too old for SD slots, and nobody's shown any interest so development is stalled.)
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Are you kidding? Just read the story!
For years, students, journalists, makers and old-school engineers have asked why the Arduino open source microcontroller platform has taken off, with over 100k units 'in the wild'
For years! folks have been asking why it took off! Years!
First wikipedia entry less than 5 years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arduino&oldid=56466347 [wikipedia.org]
Over 100K units in the wild! That's 100 TIMES 1000! WINNER!
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Yet 100K Arduino "win," if you put enough qualifiers on the criteria (microcontollers, on a development board, costing between $25 and $50?). Enjoy the win.
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doo-doo head
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The criteria is pretty much a popularity contest that never ends.
Or are you one of those types that still thinks the Amiga is going to have a comeback any year now?
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I love the Arduino, it's one of the best uC's I've ever used.
Then you should know that Arduino isn't a microcontroller. It's a board with a micro installed on it. And you obviously haven't used many if it's "one of the best you've ever used."
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Why is that a "wrong choice"? There are plenty of folks who just want to dabble on weekends or do Cool Thing X without a heavy investment in semiconductor physics, indirect addressing modes and Karnaugh maps, and there are still plenty of Real Devkits (or Arduinos driven straight from avr-gcc/avrdude) out there for those that don't. There are also plenty of folks who don't know how to change the oil in their cars, but they still get where they wanted to go.
From the article, which you purport to have read:
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