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Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

jaycarlson.net

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Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#151

Post by zo1 »

ashark wrote: post #111
kbart wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One other thing I've noticed, and it's been happening for a few years. Is that somehow, magically, there are websites out there that have the exact combination of my search results in their title. Almost as if Google forwarded my search to some party which then went ahead and created a dummy "proxy-search" site with the exact heading, and whose body just contains their own results for the same search criteria I used.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#152

Post by j_s »

jo909 wrote: post #142
j_s wrote: post #105

What is the minimum horsepower to build a WiFi KVM? The monitor part seems toughest; if it's possible to do so cheaply I don't care how fast it updates. I plan on trying out this $12 ESP8266-based device which ships configured as a USB serial port -- I plan on using it as a serial console. It would be awesome if I could convince it to somehow act as a USB VGA-enough and see both the boot/BIOS screens and the OS GUI.…

USB mouse and keyboard is already possible on ESP8266: https://github.com/cnlohr/espusb As for VGA i think you are out of luck, or need a faster/specialized co-processor. VGA requires 3 analog inputs of at least ~30MHz, and an ESP8266 has one analog input in the low (I think I've seen 20) kHz range, so more than 1000 times too slow.

Thanks much for taking the time to share your expertise in answering my question!

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#153

Post by drzaiusapelord »

vidarh wrote: post #89
koancone wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

From the first sentences of this article: > As an embedded design consultant I know that for my own part, a lot of what I blog when I blog tends to be motivated either from increasing my professional visibility or because it's something I spend time doing anyway and where I figure I it'll be useful to someone (I know I've done it right whenever I find my own blog posts in search results a couple of years later and th…

Also people like to talk about their interests and work. I don't see a lot of my own writings being about profit. My interest in them existed well before they helped me get into this profession.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#154

Post by DSMan195276 »

kirillkh wrote: post #70
neya wrote: post #67

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?

You don't really need a dev board for these, you can just stick them in a breadboard and go, they're already in a DIP package and don't really need any extra circuitry besides what you're going to connect them to. You can also program them using basically any other micro-controller you may have, or use a cheap USB programmer to do it, so they're pretty cheap to get started with (Though it's not exactly as user-friendly as plugging an Arduino into USB).

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#156

Post by jo909 »

j_s wrote: post #152
jo909 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USB mouse and keyboard is already possible on ESP8266: https://github.com/cnlohr/espusb As for VGA i think you are out of luck, or need a faster/specialized co-processor. VGA requires 3 analog inputs of at least ~30MHz, and an ESP8266 has one analog input in the low (I think I've seen 20) kHz range, so more than 1000 times too slow.

Thanks much for taking the time to share your expertise in answering my question!

You're welcome. I looked into it because it would make a pretty cool project and while pretty advanced, not impossible.

The cheapest analog-digital-converter chip I found is the TVP7002. Dealing with the digital pixel output is still way way too much data, but now it might be possible to scan the picture a few pixels each loop. The reasonable approach would be to process it in an FPGA or specialized chip and only deal with a compressed and scaled image in the ESP8266.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#157

Post by cjsuk »

05 wrote: post #150
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…

£8 is not even close to 'ridiculously cheap', compared to, say, Cortex-M0 STM32 boards for $1.5 with free shipping https://www.ebay.com/itm/1PCS-STM32F030F4P6-ARM-CORTEX-M0-Co...

Yeah you can indeed.

But that £8 includes next day courier delivery (which is free), a phone number you can actually call and talk to someone instantly, materials and tutorials on their web site and product support.

They do a slightly lesser dev board for £3 as well.

Hell I can order a £0.20 resistor and get it next day!

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#158

Post by TheCowboy »

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…

Practical Electronics for Inventors, Fourth Edition by Scherz and Monk (1056 pages) ~$25

I've only used the 3rd edition, but I found it very accessible and well-written. I think the 4th edition has expanded content for microcontrollers and plan on getting it when I have the time to play around with electronics again.

What I liked about the book is that it provided information in a practical way so you could "just build something" without knowing all of the theory, but the theory was available when you wanted to increase your depth of understanding.

I admit the title is cheesy, but I could see this book being used to teach an introductory class on electronics. It also serves as a good reference entry point for topics/electronics where you're completely clueless.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#159

Post by derefr »

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…

How about an (technical advisor to a) buyer for a company like Adafruit, that both resells SoC/microcontroller "developer boards", and puts out their own? I could see them writing up their experience in trying to find good SoCs to base their products on, and how they compare to the ones in the boards they resell.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#160

Post by StavrosK »

lettergram wrote: post #144
TeMPOraL wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The way I look at it: SEO really works, and shit sources tend to spend a lot on it, while quality sources tend to not spend anything on it at all - therefore a lot of qua…

I posted this in another comment, but this is exactly why I built a project I call Piglet: https://projectpiglet.com/ Google is really good for general information, but really bad for domain specific information. Piglet (in contrast) is really good at domain specific, but can be poor in the general case (although I haven't seen that yet). We track discussions around the articles, as opposed to linked pages. This typi…

Is there any way to use just the search engine bit? I don't care much about investing, but it'd be great if you could take the investment-specific information out of the free/public account and just returned the results for searches.
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