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If I hadn't seen this article on Hacker News today, is there any combination of plausible keywords I could have typed into Google to find this particular article if I were looking for an in-depth review of microcontrollers? I tried "best microcontrollers reviewed", "best low-cost microcontrollers", "survey of microcontrollers", and a bunch of others. Nothing that Google finds in the first 10-20 hits is as good this r…
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it's HN's hug of death
I'm sure that doesn't exist. I've had my site in the front page several times and I never had a problem. I agree I'm a competent sysadm and there's a peak on visits often in a short period, but my server is not as optimised as it could be and it did just fine. I think what we have here is a server or a web app poorly configured.
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Agreed - the 3v3 thing can be a bit of a pain if you've got a collection of Arduino 5v-friendly bits, but not insurmountable. Big warning I'd make, though, is that the D1 has two revisions - the R1 (rarely described as such of course), and the R2. You definitely want the R2. However, many ebay vendors are still selling R1's.
In my experience, the ESP8266 is fine with 5V, I have yet to burn one even with 5V on its pins.
Yes and no. ESP8266 would typically survive 5V applied on any pin, and sometimes even sort-of work with 5V power applied (although with much higher power consumption and no WiFI).
But there is a catch. Pretty much all CMOS chips (ESP8266 inclided) have body diodes from each IO pin to power/ground. This means - you can't have voltage higher than VCC+0.6v or lower than GND-0.6v on any pin. So what happens when you have ESP8266 powered from 3.3v and connected to 5V I/O is - ESP will get (partially) powered via I/O pin. Depending on what 5V part is connected to that I/O, that might be bad for that part (excess of I/O sink current). And in extreme cases (5V I/O pin that can deliver high current, or ESP is in deep sleep), this will supply current into 3.3V VCC rail, bringing it up as high as 5 - 0.6 = 4.4v potentially. Which could be bad for anything else on that rail.
As a practical example - let's say we have ESP8266 powered by a switching supply with MP2307DN [1] chip delivering 3.3v, and connected to a 5v AVR. In normal operation, ESP takes ~70mA, which exceeds 40mA driving capability of AVR, so it's all good [2]. However once ESP8266 goes to deep sleep, all 40mA from AVR's I/O go via ESP's body diode back to MP2307DN switch, which usually would fail catastrophically and end up shorting input to output, supplying 12 (or whatever the input is) volts to ESP's VCC. Which is likely to fail as well, sending 12v further and frying the whole thing.
[1] MP2307DN is widely and cheaply available on "Mini360 DC-DC buck convertor" boards and it really doesn't like current being back-fed into its output
[2] Except I/O drive transistor in AVR is overloaded, which might or might not lead to its failure eventually.
Ecosystem is an interesting area. It seems that everyone has converged on Eclipse, which is probably better than trying to write their own environment but can still be infuriatingly clunky at times.
I'm impressed with the breadth of this review and the commitment to including everything that fits in the $1 parameter - which is now quite a lot, I hadn't expected to see Cypress PSOC there.
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In my experience, the ESP8266 is fine with 5V, I have yet to burn one even with 5V on its pins.
> ESP8266 is fine with 5V Yes and no. ESP8266 would typically survive 5V applied on any pin, and sometimes even sort-of work with 5V power applied (although with much higher power consumption and no WiFI). But there is a catch. Pretty much all CMOS chips (ESP8266 inclided) have body diodes from each IO pin to power/ground. This means - you can't have voltage higher than VCC+0.6v or lower than GND-0.6v on any pin. So…
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Yea I'm hoping somebody can provide a list of various manufacturers and part names similar to the article..
My article includes the Holtek HT-66, the STCmicro STC8, the Nuvoton N76, and the ST STM8 — all hover in the 1-2 RMB range (especially when purchased in volume from within the mainland). The STC8 and N76 parts are 8051, the other two are their own design. The HT-66 looks very much like a PIC16 part, and IDE and compiler are totally free. The STM8 is probably the best-performing part in that price range, and has a fre…
I've had the best overall experience using an ATTINY85 [1]. It almost serves my purpose for every use case I've had in the past couple of years - Running steppers, basic home automation, wireless, etc. If you buy them in bulk, you can get it down to less than $1 per MC. [2] You can even install Arduino libs on it and the Arduino interface has quite good support for it as well. Some of my projects with it include a DS…
Do you just use development boards with these? And which ones?
If I hadn't seen this article on Hacker News today, is there any combination of plausible keywords I could have typed into Google to find this particular article if I were looking for an in-depth review of microcontrollers? I tried "best microcontrollers reviewed", "best low-cost microcontrollers", "survey of microcontrollers", and a bunch of others. Nothing that Google finds in the first 10-20 hits is as good this r…
[best $1 microcontroller] returns it on top.
If I hadn't seen this article on Hacker News today, is there any combination of plausible keywords I could have typed into Google to find this particular article if I were looking for an in-depth review of microcontrollers? I tried "best microcontrollers reviewed", "best low-cost microcontrollers", "survey of microcontrollers", and a bunch of others. Nothing that Google finds in the first 10-20 hits is as good this r…
An ordinary journalist could not write this article. It would take hundreds or thousands of hours to gain the domain knowledge required to understand what needs to be written up and described - it demonstrates a deep understanding of topics like ISR latencies, peripheral compatibility, memory and instruction requirements, and other stuff that really matters to engineers but is typically beyond the reach of a casual reader. As a result, news in the field is very, very rarely unbiased, informative reviews - there are a lot of 'new product' press releases unsubtly promoted as 'articles'.
An embedded systems engineer at some company building a product using these microcontrollers would not write up this article. Not only is the comprehensive knowledge required uncommon even among skilled engineers, it would take dozens of non-billable hours and would make it easier for competitors. And we typically have very narrow domain expertise, so the ability to create a website and rich blog experience like this would be unusual. (The database issues the site had under load this morning are excused!) Open-source and information sharing are not commonplace within embedded systems development.
And you won't be able to easily generate this comparison yourself without a lot of work. You might think that the numbers described would be front-and-center on the first page of each datasheet for these microcontrollers. But you'd be wrong, or at least naive. Each manufacturer's marketing department exaggerates their numbers in slightly different ways, so the first page of the datasheet is inevitably worthless bull shit.