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

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

#221

Post by archimedespi »

Animats wrote: post #219
archimedespi wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason someone serious about embedded development would want to buy Arduino boards is that they're convenient Atmel-architecture microcontroller boards. The ESP8266 may be "arduino compatible", but a large number of those Arduino libraries running on it had to be rewritten. If you want convenience and ISA/peripheral-register compatibility with existing low-level Arduino code, you're locked in to atmegas unless yo…

The next step up was the Arduino Due, which is a low-end ARM system supported by the Arduino toolchain. But it seems to have been retired. (Now I find this out. I built something on a Due because I needed more memory and CPU speed.)

It may be retired, but Sparkfun still sells it[1].

If you're looking for other faster microcontrollers with Arduino toolchain support, there's a bunch of stuff out there. See the Wikipedia page on non-atmega Arduino-supported boards: [2].

Additionally, if you're willing to learn how to use the ARM CMSIS HAL and write raw C++, there's the STM32 series of microcontrollers. Those also support Mbed, if you want to learn that instead (it's much easier than using CMSIS with C++, it's basically the equivalent of arduino for many 32-bit ARM microcontrollers).

[1]- https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11589

[2]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arduino_boards_and_com...

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

#222

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

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?

My practical-ish project: an advanced egg-timer.

I looked for some time trying to find a good egg timer, but there are really just two options, and neither are that great. You can have a nice, intuitive analog interface (the classic dial timer), but you lack precision and many are very poorly constructed and unreliable (seriously, look at Amazon reviews for this type). There's also no way to fine-tune the alarm; some are horrendous, while other are inaudible. The digital ones solve some of this issue, but have terrible UI requiring many button clicks.

I used a digispark ($1 for ebay clones), two rotary switches set up as voltage dividers, an arcade button, and an addressable LED strip to make a better timer. You input minutes with one knob, and seconds with the other. This has wonderful tactile feedback, is completely precise, and entirely intuitive. The LED strip counts up (and shifts red to green) as the timer passes, does a rainbow swipe/strobe for a few seconds to alert, and then 'cools down' so you can get a sense of how badly you overshot. There's also a buzzer. It's good for the kitchen, but I actually find it best as a rest-period timer for weightlifting. The visual display is great for loud gyms.

It's 100% a better timer than anything else on the market, and I absolutely love it.

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

#223

Post by spraak »

nameless912 wrote: post #218
brianobush wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but in the end they did promote a cheap, easy to use platform something that the processing guys didn't quite achieve.

> Cheap I wholeheartedly disagree. A TI launchpad dev board is sub-10 dollars in bulk, and an ESP8266 (which is almost incomprehensibly more powerful and has built-in WiFi) dev board is 15-ish. And both of those have nice friendly Arduino wrappers. There's really very little reason to buy vanilla Arduino anymore other than the somewhat larger community.

Do you have any links to where to get started with the boards you mention? Shops, community etc?

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

#224

Post by soapdog »

marcosdumay wrote: post #202
soapdog wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My recommendation is a bit different, instead of that, try looking for a local manufacturer and support them. Here in Brazil, people go for the cheap aliexpress clones to the point where some of our own manufacturers are closing shop. In these cases, strengthening the local ecosystem might be interesting and wiser in the long run.

Hum... I've never seen a Brazilian Arduino clone. Didn't even expect it to exist. Where can I get one?

There are many clones. Check out "mateduino"[2] which is made in the south of Brazil and also the one from robocore which is made in the southeast. There are others. The ones from robocore are great[1].

[1]: https://www.robocore.net/modules.php?name=GR_LojaVirtual&pro... [2]: https://matehackers.org/mateduino

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

#225

Post by anotherevan »

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?

Last week I used a Leostick[1] and an SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor[2] to create a presence detector for my computer. Now, if music is playing whenever I get up and walk away from my computer, it pauses the media player, and when I come back it starts playing again automatically.

[1] http://www.freetronics.com.au/products/leostick

[2] http://www.instructables.com/id/Simple-Arduino-and-HC-SR04-E...

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

#226

Post by nameless912 »

spraak wrote: post #223
nameless912 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cheap I wholeheartedly disagree. A TI launchpad dev board is sub-10 dollars in bulk, and an ESP8266 (which is almost incomprehensibly more powerful and has built-in WiFi) dev board is 15-ish. And both of those have nice friendly Arduino wrappers. There's really very little reason to buy vanilla Arduino anymore other than the somewhat larger community.

Do you have any links to where to get started with the boards you mention? Shops, community etc?

TI launchpads can be bought direct from TI. I don't have a link handy.

As for the ESP8266, Adafruit sells a board called the HUZZAH ESP8266.

For both, the best resource in my opinion for environment set up/build system is platformio (platformio.org). It exposes an Arduino-style API for both boards, so basically the arduino docs will get you 95% of the way there, and the community sourced libraries in platformio will get you the rest of the way.

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

#227

Post by juliendorra »

dingo_bat wrote: post #5

Bah! Arduino is way overpriced for the specs anyway. Raspberry pi and others are where it's at now. But I do think there is a massive power usage difference.

I witnessed two of my students trying to drive a neopixel led strip using a Raspberry Pi, and after hours of struggling with Python scripts broken by Raspian updates, they just stopped trying.

Before that, they had it working with an Arduino board quite easily (as Adafruit have example scripts and a library available). They are total beginners.

No operating system mean less power but also less complexity.

Sometimes a simpler system is better.

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

#228

Post by erichocean »

sandyjmacdonald wrote: post #209
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!

BBC micro:bit?

Nice! Hadn't seen that one before...

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

#229

Post by brianobush »

nameless912 wrote: post #218
brianobush wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but in the end they did promote a cheap, easy to use platform something that the processing guys didn't quite achieve.

> Cheap I wholeheartedly disagree. A TI launchpad dev board is sub-10 dollars in bulk, and an ESP8266 (which is almost incomprehensibly more powerful and has built-in WiFi) dev board is 15-ish. And both of those have nice friendly Arduino wrappers. There's really very little reason to buy vanilla Arduino anymore other than the somewhat larger community.

A typical hobbyist doesn't need to buy in bulk. When I started with Arduino when it first came out, I never heard of TI launchpad series. So Arduino was first to the show. As a side: in my simple projects, not one has ever needed Wi-Fi; especially when considering power consumption.

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

#230

Post by michaelt »

Radiant wrote: post #190
michaelt wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can read datasheets perfectly well, and Arduino seems pretty good by the low standards of microprocessor programming tooling.

I mean, you can program in C rather than assembly language! And you don't have to pay £300 a seat for the compiler! It works on windows, linux and mac instead of being windows-only! If you open source your project, other people can contribute and they don't even need a £150 tool to download the program to the chip! Other people can compile your code and have it work without needing to know the details of 'linker scripts' and 'codesourcery toolchains' and all that stuff!

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