Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

jaycarlson.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 191 posts

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#111

Post by ashark »

kbart wrote: post #41
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…

I've noticed recently (few years maybe) that Google "punishes" results from blogs and less known domains. Searching for some specific keyword combination often results in skipping first few pages of cruft from popular sites just to find exactly what I was looking for in some blog post buried >3 pages deep.

Sometime around the housing market crash (though unrelated, I assume) Google seemed to give up on fighting spam sites and just harshly down-ranked anything that's wasn't an ultra-high-traffic site. A little while later (2010? 2011?) their search got much "smarter" and it became difficult to impossible to trick it into giving you less-popular results using well-crafted searches. A big (and very good!) chunk of the web became way less visible over that span of 2-3 years or so—and my impressive-even-to-other-developers Shaolin Google-Fu was defeated by Google's Tiger Style :-(

You can also see the ugly results of their new ranking system any time you search for a simple answer that deserves maybe two sentences, and are greeted with ten search results all of which are a dozen rambling, content-free paragraphs, with a title closely matching your search and with your answer buried somewhere inside (maybe). That reads as "high value" and "high relevance" so google eats it up, even though it's 100% grade-A garbage content.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#112

Post by michrassena »

drcongo wrote: post #36
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…

I've noticed some _very_ odd things going on with Google Search results recently. The other day I tried a search for an error message from SQLAlchemy, the results were poor so I added the word `SQLAlchemy` to the query and it removed _all_ answers about databases and returned a bunch of stuff about mineral mining.

To get anything useful out of Google, I often have to resort to using "verbatim" results from the search tools. Those results are much closer to the old Google than the standard search, but not perfect.

I remember how revolutionary late 90s Google was in how it would show you exactly what you were looking for, or pages with relevant content, whereas the other popular search engines was just be a jumble of stuff.

It seems like in order to monetize search, Google has had to regress what once worked well.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#114

Post by joezydeco »

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…

I suppose the lessons are: there's room for lots of improvement in search engines

There's also the tried and true distribution method of newsletters and mailing lists specific to a certain industry.

If you've been in embedded a long time, you probably know about Jack Ganssle and his "Embedded Muse" newsletter, which has been going on for about 20 years now.

http://www.ganssle.com/tem/tem337.html

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#115

Post by gh02t »

abetusk wrote: post #55

The most relevant part for me is this cherry picked line from the article: ... Consequently, the megaAVR remains the most open-source 8-bit microcontroller on the market — by a long shot. ... Even though the Atmel AVRs aren't the fastest, or cheapest (in cost per unit) or the toolchain isn't the easiest to use or the debugging capabilities aren't as good, the fact that it's open-source makes it win, hands down. There…

It's important to note the rest of that portion though.

    But even as popular as Atmel is among hobbyists, Atmel has largely stayed out of this 
    space directly. Instead, they’ve secured small-volume AVR sales by relying on the open-
    source community to build their own tools for themselves: turning out a slew of 
    hardware and software used to program the megaAVR devices.

    While I applaud the efforts of these developers, these tools are inferior to Atmel’s. 
    Their programming speeds are terrible, they don’t support the new tinyAVR 1-Series 
    devices, and they have absolutely no debug capability.
Atmel has deliberately enabled the open source toolchains for its MCUs but it largely keeps out of it directly.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#116

Post by joezydeco »

jokoon wrote: post #103

Well at this point all I would like to get is a USB-powered linux in a card, with wifi, optionally with a screen capable enough to display 3 or 4 lines of text. I mean raspberry is cool, cheap and everything, but I'd prefer something all integrated, as small as the raspberry pi zero, less fragile (meaning I can put in my pocket or bag, and still expect it to work), not necessarily with pins. I don't know about what t…

It's getting close. There are newer SoCs that are MMU capable and also contain enough RAM and Flash to run a small Linux instance off a single part...or a single part with some simple QSPI flash hung off of it. Renesas has the RZ line that can do this, but it will probably take up $30-$35 of your $50 budget.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#117

Post by joezydeco »

cjsuk wrote: post #6

That’s a rather good article. I will digest that today. I’m currently using Cypress’s PSoC line (4200M boards) for a couple of personal projects. The reconfigurable hardware and analogue parts actually kill a lot of external hardware. It’s pretty amazing and ridiculously cheap. Visual Studio is the IDE for this. https://uk.rs-online.com/mobile/p/processor-microcontroller-... Note: don’t just jump into these if you th…

PSoC is an underrated line of parts. Now that they've dropped the wacky 8051-alike used in the older models and switched to ARM, there's a lot more you can do with these things.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#118

Post by user5994461 »

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…

>>> I suppose the lessons are: there's room for lots of improvement in search engines, or SEO really works and you better promote yourself no matter how good you are, or word of mouth (Hacker News in this case) is still the way to find the best stuff.

As someone who runs a similar blog and is first page for hundreds of search terms, Google is fantastic at discovering niche content. You can't even being to fathom how good it is.

The article is already the 4th google result if you look for "best micro controllers under a dollar".

If anything, the title should be improved by the author. "The Amazing $1 Microcontroller" is a very poor description of the content and noone is going to google that.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#119

Post by jpablo »

xt00 wrote: post #7

Now if somebody from China can make a list of the cheap micros under 1-2 RMB, now that would be a nice list for super low cost stuff.. that I'd be very interested in...

Recently I was looking for a project that required a network of microcontroler and was looking for the cheapest mcu in around quantity 50. My requirements where pretty modest, I just needed 2 GPIO and 1 PWM ouput.

I ended up ordering the Attiny13A as that was the cheapest option in aliexpress/ebay with freeshipping in small quantities (around USD $0.3 a piece).

I would have loved to find something even cheaper!

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#120

Post by jventura »

Maybe is not the best topic to ask, but does anyone know good sources (websites, books, kits) for playing with and learning a bit more about microcontrollers and electronics? I would prefer structured sources (those that take newbies by hand) than unstructured ones..

I used to play a little bit with the nerdkits (http://www.nerdkits.com) and really enjoyed their approach but they seem to have gone out of business and their content has not been updated for some years..

Post reply on HN