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

131–140 of 191 posts

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#131

Post by dfox »

aexaey wrote: post #73
StavrosK wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was somewhat surprised that ESP32 not only survived being powered from 5V, but worked somewhat reliably while so and I only noticed that the software issues I was debugging were caused by that from the smoke coming off the paper label on breakout module.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#132

Post by carbocation »

StavrosK wrote: post #87
carbocation wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried the NodeMCU? (Not suggesting it, as I actually killed mine when trying to program it, but more curious about whether you’ve compared it to the Wemos D1.)

Yes, many of them, and a few others. The D1 is much smaller and has no redundant pins. It's also sexier.

Awesome. Thank you!

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#133

Post by StavrosK »

carbocation wrote: post #132
StavrosK wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, many of them, and a few others. The D1 is much smaller and has no redundant pins. It's also sexier.

Awesome. Thank you!

No problem, enjoy! You can also try something like this, if you want to power it from a battery: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/WeMos-D1-Esp-Wroom-02-Mother...

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#134

Post by jventura »

deeg wrote: post #122
jventura wrote: post #120

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 a…

adafruit.com and sparkfun.com are two of my go-tos. Pretty strong community support.

Thanks for your input, I briefly checked those links and they seem to be stores and quite overwhelming in their range of products and tutorials. What I'm looking for is mostly project tutorials or books at a basic level, as in "how do I start?". For instance, the nerdkit had me build a temperature sensor from the most basic parts and display the temperature in a LCD (bundled with the kit).

Any other suggestions?

Edit: typos

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#135

Post by jason_s »

joezydeco wrote: post #117
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.

hope the development toolchain is better than it was 6 or 7 years ago... I wanted to look into PSoC but couldn't figure out how to blink an LED after a few hours of messing around with it, so I gave up. And I'm not a beginner; I've had 22 years of microcontroller experience.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#136

Post by radix07 »

abetusk wrote: post #108
radix07 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source hardware in the microcontroller world isn't quite as big of a deal as it is in the software world. While it would be great to see the processor architecture and all, I would much rather have an ARM that I know works and won't have to look at. I believe modern Arduinos are going to Cortex processors which are ARM as well, so I don't think the open source claim is what keeps Arduino hardware going. It is mo…

I agree that open source hardware isn't as big of a deal (yet?) as open source software but the open source that we're talking about here is mostly software in the form of Arduino libraries to drive modules and other chips. I think the major point is that "ease of use, accessibility, community and the tools" are exactly where the open source software model thrives over a walled garden one. It's not impossible to do t…

I would love to see open source hardware take off at that level! You do see plenty of projects at the PCB level, which is nice and likely as far as most people will ever need to go. The price point of a small custom PCB is actually very reasonable now and usually easier to buy than rolling your own anymore.

But until you can spin your own silicon with the ease of something like a 3D printer or buy custom low cost/quantity silicon, it doesn't matter what your open source HW design does if you don't have the money or a business to create and distribute it. That's one thing that is very hard to do with something physical and why opensource has worked so well in the software community.

There does seem to be some stuff being done here using FPGAs... But they are still a rather expensive way to go just to drop a custom architecture on for now.

In the meantime, there is still plenty of software work to do to make a truly useful and professional grade opensouce stack that you can develop on the chips we have.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#137

Post by hathawsh »

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.…

FWIW, based on recommendations here at HN, I went with the WEMOS D1 Mini early this year when I decided to replace all the electronics in my kids' RC trucks. The project went amazingly well. In each of the 2 trucks, I wired it up with a WEMOS motor controller driving a 9V/2A motor, a smaller motor for turning, and some LEDs. I 3D printed new shells with Lego compatible studs on top. I hot glued the electronics inside. I wrote mostly-ordinary Arduino code. All of this took only about 2 weeks in my spare time.

So now my kids have 2 wifi-tablet-controlled trucks with very custom programming (for N-point turns, playing music through the motor windings, headlight blinking, etc.) and the ability to update the program over the air at any time. It's basically magic. I spent only about $8 per truck.

Yeah, the WEMOS D1 is the real deal. I love it so much that I bought a pile of them before I've even decided what I want to use them for.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#138

Post by joezydeco »

jason_s wrote: post #135
joezydeco wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

hope the development toolchain is better than it was 6 or 7 years ago... I wanted to look into PSoC but couldn't figure out how to blink an LED after a few hours of messing around with it, so I gave up. And I'm not a beginner; I've had 22 years of microcontroller experience.

It's still heavily dependent on the IDE, but at least you're not bound to the compilers that were used 6 or 7 years ago. The better compiler of the two was bought by Microchip and subsequently abandoned/crippled-on-purpose for the PSoC instruction set.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#139

Post by jhallenworld »

Not the cheapest perhaps, but I recently used Ambiq's Apollo for a project. It's an ultra low power ARM MCU. I found it very nice to use mainly because Ambiq only has two models at this point, which makes their libraries very clean.

The other advantage is that its I2C slave core operates autonomously- it provides a shared register space. It means that a master can write a bunch of stuff to the shared memory without waking up the CPU during each transaction (which usually involves clock stretching).

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#140

Post by hexane360 »

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…

This is why I'm so excited to see Rust (with full core libs) running on AVR.

https://github.com/avr-rust

Post reply on HN