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Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

blog.pimoroni.com

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Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#181

Post by syntheticnature »

azdle wrote: post #110
Karunamon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A rackmount server can control some RGB LEDs, if wired correctly. That doesn't mean a rackmount server is in the same category as a Pi. Furthermore, most people using Pis and Ardunios are hobbyists who are necessarily familiar with the raw technical implementation and are choosing the product based on that technical data.

Yeah, but if a rack-mount server was cheaper, easier to use, about the same size, and used a reasonable amount of power compared to an Arduino, I'd probably use a rack-mount server for all my DIY projects.

Digging into it, it looks like the Arduino and friends trump the Pi versus sleep/idle modes in terms of power draw, and that's likely useful for easy battery operation. If you're tapping mains power, it's likely a rounding error.

OTOH, all the folks saying the knockoffs are $2-10, that's cheaper than a Pi.

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#182

Post by merpnderp »

nathancahill wrote: post #28

Serious question: what are people building with these boards? The recurring projects I've seen are controlling lights, doors/locks and monitoring water in plants. I don't find these particularly compelling, am I missing something? How is this the next big thing?

When they first came out I used one to build a UAV on top of a 6' electric glider. The Arduino simply controlled the PWM's for the rudder, elevator and motor and then fed sensor data over a zigbee. My laptop, connected through a zigbee, actually flew the plane. I had hacked together my own INS from accelerometers and magnetometers, plus a joystick to override.

Was fun until it crashed into a pond after a stupid code update that had the IR sensors invert the sky and ground.

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#183

Post by pjmlp »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #124
nathancahill wrote: post #28

Serious question: what are people building with these boards? The recurring projects I've seen are controlling lights, doors/locks and monitoring water in plants. I don't find these particularly compelling, am I missing something? How is this the next big thing?

I don't think it's "the next big thing." Not everything needs to be. I'm making a synthesizer with the Arduino Due (and Teensy which is compatible). It's a fun playground for things I would never normally get to do in C++ and asm. I've never gotten to code on a platform with true realtime and no OS restrictions before. Also the barrier to entry is so low, it makes it so much fun. WIthin less than 15 minutes of receiv…

For me that would be the fun of it, to go back to the days where the language runtime was the OS and we literally own the machine.

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#184

Post by canada_dry »

ohitsdom wrote: post #99
SEJeff wrote: post #66

I really don't see the point of the arduinos when you can buy an esp8266 that is arduino compatible (you can use the arduino IDE and sketches). You can get the bare esp8266 chips for $1-$2 from aliexpress, or buy a tricked out one from adafruit (the huzzah) for $9. They have a full wifi stack, support micropython, etc. I think we're in a post-arduino age for microcontrollers. There are simply better options out there…

I don't understand the comments that ESP8266's can replace Arduinos. Don't you still need to wire the ESP8266 to a microcontroller? I'm a hardware novice, and I love Arduinos. I'd appreciate any info to help me learn, seems like I'm missing something. To me the ESP8266 is a superior alternative to Arduino wifi shields, not the Arduino itself.

What used to be the biggest advantage for Arduino - and still is, though diminishing quickly - is support for a variety of peripherals e.g. TFT displays, servos, analog and digital sensors.

With the proliferation of so many arduino hardware variations and knockoffs it's getting harder and harder to match the correct library with specific hardware.

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#185

Post by Florin_Andrei »

nathancahill wrote: post #28

Serious question: what are people building with these boards? The recurring projects I've seen are controlling lights, doors/locks and monitoring water in plants. I don't find these particularly compelling, am I missing something? How is this the next big thing?

Well, I built these things:

1. A mechanical/environmental monitor/display for a grinding/polishing machine for telescope mirrors. It measures the rotation speed of two key machine parts; also measures ambiental temperature and humidity. It displays all these parameters on a front panel.

http://florin.myip.org/blog/making-tachometer-grinding-polis...

2. Lights control for an aquarium

Regular fish tank, LED lights with timer. The lights would turn on or off suddenly, scaring the fish. :) I used pulse-width modulation and a MOS-FET to gradually fade the lights in and out over 1 hour.

3. PC clock

I've setup time limits on PC usage for my kids. But before Windows 10 the login screen on Windows 7 didn't have the time displayed, so they didn't know when their accounts would actually let them log in. I've found a big LED display that fits almost exactly in a CD-ROM bay, and built a clock with it. It's synced to the PC every time the OS boots up.

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#186

Post by PeanutNore »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #143
PeanutNore wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wired my own custom board for it rather than using a commercial Arduino type board, but I built a guitar effects pedal that runs Arduino code to process a guitar signal using the built in ADC and a pretty basic passive DAC. It works great for effects like bitcrushing, distortion, compression, and I'm trying to get high and low pass filters working on it but haven't made any progress lately. Schematic and code: http…

This is really cool, I'm doing something similar! I'm making synthesizers with the Uno and Due; I haven't tried doing anything with audio input yet, but want to play with that as well. How is the sound quality of it? I did the 8-bit resistor ladder DAC from the instructable linked, but quickly broke the layout when I tried to bring it to a friend's house and haven't tried putting the breadboard back together. I reall…

Thanks! The sound quality of it depends mostly on the sample rate it is able to achieve, which is somewhere around 9.6khz if all it's doing is reading a sample and then outputting it to the DAC. At 6bit 9.6khz a guitar sounds surprisingly clean through it, aliasing is only really noticable at the highest frets of the high strings. At lower bit depths and sample rates it gets really interesting.

Getting the best sound quality out of it also depends on finding the sweet spot on the input gain to get the best dynamic range from the DAC without clipping, although I designed the preamp to sound pleasant when overdriven, mostly using JFETs.

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#187

Post by Wiles_7 »

erichocean wrote: post #137

Anyone know of any small, low-cost, battery powered programmable boards for Bluetooth LE? I've got the Pi 3 and CHIP is ordered, but I'd love something smaller if possible. Thanks!

It's not out yet but the ESP32[0] has Bluetooth. It's small and super cheap.

[0] https://espressif.com/en/products/hardware/esp32/overview

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#188

Post by Sanddancer »

SEJeff wrote: post #66

I really don't see the point of the arduinos when you can buy an esp8266 that is arduino compatible (you can use the arduino IDE and sketches). You can get the bare esp8266 chips for $1-$2 from aliexpress, or buy a tricked out one from adafruit (the huzzah) for $9. They have a full wifi stack, support micropython, etc. I think we're in a post-arduino age for microcontrollers. There are simply better options out there…

Depends on what you need. The ESP8266 has a lot of limitations depending on what you want to do. It doesn't have any internal memory, so is dependent on an external flash device. It only has a single adc channel, so if you're doing an sort of measurement operations, you'd need a breakout board of some sort. It requires an external clock crystal, again increasing the BOM. It's also not 5v tolerant, which is useful in some applications. There are definitely a lot more compelling micros out right now, but AVRs still have a lot of tricks up their sleeve that other micros can't meet yet.

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#189

Post by Symmetry »

nathancahill wrote: post #28

Serious question: what are people building with these boards? The recurring projects I've seen are controlling lights, doors/locks and monitoring water in plants. I don't find these particularly compelling, am I missing something? How is this the next big thing?

As a small robotics startup we use Arduinos to control our grippers just because it was easy for the founders to get started and because adding new features is fairly fast. We've actually moved to a board that pretends to be a mega2560 but is entirely custom but we're still sticking with the Arduino libraries.

Some day we might move to a standard uC approach but that'll be when we have many more employees.

Re: Why we won't be selling Genuino or Arduino any more

#190

Post by Radiant »

michaelt wrote: post #98
xchip wrote: post #29

Why do you want an Arduino when the ESP8266 is half the price and has WIFI?

For applications that need Wifi, the ESP8266 is indeed a good and very competitively priced product. However, all the wifi magic on the chip is closed source, and the datasheets / documentation are much less complete than chips like the ATmega328 (which the Arduino Uno is based on). The ATmega328 has a 660-page datasheet, whereas the ESP8266 has a 30-page datasheet.

People who can read data sheets tend not to use Arduino.
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