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Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

jaycarlson.net

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Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#91

Post by qznc »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #80
alister wrote: post #11

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…

This article is remarkable because there is typically very limited accessible blogs about topics like this. This long article requires in-depth knowledge of a large number of microcontrollers, and the time, desire, and ability to verify, collate, and summarize all that information. That's a rare combination. An ordinary journalist could not write this article. It would take hundreds or thousands of hours to gain the…

> This long article requires in-depth knowledge of a large number of microcontrollers, and the time, desire, and ability to verify, collate, and summarize all that information.

So, Google needs to train its AI to recognize this instead of relying on PageRank.

We still need page rank to measure authority, though. Otherwise other AIs will soon mass produce content which looks like it "requires in-depth knowledge of a large number of microcontrollers, and the time, desire, and ability to verify, collate, and summarize all that information" but is actually nonsense. Alternatively, we trick spam producer into doing valuable work.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#92

Post by sametmax »

alister wrote: post #11

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…

The lesson is more "smart titles are fun but use a boring descriptive one if you want people to find you"

Sad since it turns everything into tasteless unoriginal yogurt. But true.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#93

Post by jo909 »

lucaspiller wrote: post #14
Yaggo wrote: post #9

Didn't read all the author's criteria, but esp8266 is worth mentioning in the context of cheap microcontrollers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266

Yeah if anyone is just looking to get started tinkering with embedded hardware I'd say this is the way to go. The chips were made popular by NodeMCU which uses Lua, but you can easily run Arduino or write plain C on the same hardware. I've tried a few breakout boards and my favourite is the WEMOS D1 Mini. All you need to supply is a MicroUSB cable. You can get them shipped from China for under $3: https://wiki.wemos.…

Absolute favorite for me too. ESP32 is now also widely available and pretty cheap for it's performance.

My second favorite ESP8266 hardware are the "Sonoff" brand WLAN mains power switches. I especially like the Sonoff S20 for its form factor, and the Sonoff POW for it's power metering capability. They contain an ESP8266 and can be reflashed with different firmware that does not need the vendors cloud services to work.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#94

Post by kingosticks »

koancone wrote: post #81
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is remarkable because there is typically very limited accessible blogs about topics like this. This long article requires in-depth knowledge of a large number of microcontrollers, and the time, desire, and ability to verify, collate, and summarize all that information. That's a rare combination. An ordinary journalist could not write this article. It would take hundreds or thousands of hours to gain the…

So why was it written, what is the motivation of the author?

And from https://jaycarlson.net/about/:

> Jay is available for engineering services on a contract basis

I'm not saying that's the number one goal here, I think this very thorough and informative piece goes way beyond a personal advert. But it must help (and rightly so).

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#95

Post by VLM »

No love for the PIC10 series? Perhaps too many PIC already in the review would make it look like a MicroCHIP(TM) press release. I do see some justification in that the 10F series is more of the twenty five cents class not the $1 class. Those things are strangely charming, I had a lot of fun with the now-discontinued 10F2xx series. Adjusted for inflation the 10F3xx are now cheaper than the 10F2xx were, which is cool. Its strange to drink a can of diet coke knowing it costs 3 times as much as the controller you're troubleshooting.

Another novelty of small/cheap controllers is when I was playing with the defunct 10F2xx family I didn't own a meter sensitive enough to measure the current draw at 32 khz clock. I do now, but it was an expensive meter! In the old days cheap EE would wire up a capacitor and run the ckt off the cap and time how long the voltage drop took and use that to create an imaginary resistance and use the measured V and theoretical R to calculate the theoretical current. Of course my cheap meter drew more current than the microcontroller which leads to weird games like sample voltage for a second. Also leakage currents in most caps is larger than the uC current draw oh so much fun fun fun. One trick is to drive a square wave generator thru a diode to a low leakage ceramic disk cap, assuming your reset circuitry is faster than the square wave and you trust the DC response of your scope. Another thing I tried was creating a transfer function where a 100 watt lightbulb and a tiny solar panel generate say, 1 mA, so a 99.9% optical attenuator in front of the cell means 1 uA, right? Of course sleep current is a tiny fraction of that, so you stack a SECOND optical attenuator on the solar cell, say merely 99% blocking, and that should be 10 nA which is about half sleep current, right? You can also play games when your CPU costs 30 cents like hooking up 100 in parallel for $30 to measure 100x average current. Low current is fun if you're ever bored.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#96

Post by pjc50 »

VLM wrote: post #95

No love for the PIC10 series? Perhaps too many PIC already in the review would make it look like a MicroCHIP(TM) press release. I do see some justification in that the 10F series is more of the twenty five cents class not the $1 class. Those things are strangely charming, I had a lot of fun with the now-discontinued 10F2xx series. Adjusted for inflation the 10F3xx are now cheaper than the 10F2xx were, which is cool.…

Whenever this kind of low current stuff is discussed, I like to bring up the master, Bob Pease: http://www.electronicdesign.com/test-amp-measurement/whats-a...

(also the article has reservations about PIC, pointing out its strangenesses and describing PIC24 as underwhelming)

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#98

Post by steveklabnik »

techdragon wrote: post #23
kirillkh wrote: post #22

Can any of these be programmed with Rust?

Seriously curious about this. If not these ones, what other microcontrollers have decent or better rust support? Is there a list somewhere? I'm keen to have more practical uses for my rust skills so I can enjoy using rust without having to find excuses to use it where I would be more productive with other languages.

Your sibling has some good links, but a decent way to think about it is, from hard to easy:

* does it have an LLVM backend?

* is it listed on the forge page?

* is it listed as having std support?

The farther you go down this list, the simpler it gets to use Rust for it.

Latest work has been on ARM boards and a ton of work on AVR, which brings 8/16 but support.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#99

Post by pjc50 »

syntaxing wrote: post #97

Completely off topic but does anyone know what the site is running and whether its a "theme"? I'm planning to write something technical and I am a huge fan on how the website is structured.

A quick look at the source suggests it's Wordpress with "TheGem" theme.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#100

Post by syntaxing »

pjc50 wrote: post #99
syntaxing wrote: post #97

Completely off topic but does anyone know what the site is running and whether its a "theme"? I'm planning to write something technical and I am a huge fan on how the website is structured.

A quick look at the source suggests it's Wordpress with "TheGem" theme.

Awesome! Thank you!
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