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Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

jaycarlson.net

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Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#171

Post by ksangeelee »

Treblemaker wrote: post #169
ksangeelee wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been on my mind for a while that I could use a search engine that's seeded only with sites that contain little or no advertising or tracking. A starting point could even be the corpus of HN articles and comments, perhaps augmented with entries from the Common Crawl archives and traditional crawling. I tend to be interested in novel and creative work, and it seems to me that most of the sites I find most rewardin…

I've been thinking about this recently, too. This was just on the front page of HN yesterday: "Does anyone remember websites?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631565 "Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost. In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and comput…

Thanks - that post had been on my readar, but got forgotten.

The paragraph you quote pretty much sums up my feelings, though I'm not particularly concerned with finding old school sites.

Google used to do a good job of answering technical questions, as well as finding the little gems of originality (and lots of lovely mediocrity too, of course).

I don't think the two need be mutually exclusive. It's just that what I consider the good stuff is lost in the attention seeking nonsense that the web has become. Filter that out, and I have a feeling that lots of great stuff will become a lot more accessible.

wiby is wonderful, I had a play around and found pangs of nostalgia, and stuff that made me laugh out loud. But I think the criteria of lightness of a site, for example, the amount of JavaScript used, means it will be missing many great contemporary sites that happen to use the technology of today.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#172

Post by lettergram »

StavrosK wrote: post #160
lettergram wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not at the moment, although that is an interesting idea.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#173

Post by rasz »

logicallee wrote: post #61
etiene wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I was hoping to see it there on the comparison list. I guess it fails some criteria.

It fails the "only" criterion (it costs more than $2.20, whereas the author had a strict $1 cut-off precisely stating that a huge field opens up above that price range.) Fom "the rules": >While some projects that come across my desk are complex enough to require a hundreds-of-MHz microcontroller with all the bells and whistles, it’s amazing how many projects work great using nothing more than a $1 chip — so this is t…

ESP8266 is $1.4 in single chip quantities, <$1 in bulk

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#174

Post by rootkea »

aembleton wrote: post #40
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 the second result in DDG for `survey of microcontrollers` - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=survey+of+microcontrollers&t=ffcm&...

This (besides privacy considerations) made me switch to DDG finally! Thanks!

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#175

Post by TeMPOraL »

lettergram wrote: post #172
StavrosK wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not at the moment, although that is an interesting idea.

I second the request. As I wrote in another comment, if it was good at ignoring the usual SEO crap, I'd pay for a subscription.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#176

Post by amitprayal »

dragontamer wrote: post #83

I'm not as much of an expert as the writer of this page, but this looks legit. The major $1 microcontrollers that I've worked with (Atmel series) as well as the ones that have a LOT of buzz recently (The ST STM32F0 and TI's MSP420) are all discussed and compared.

You mean TI's MSP430

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#177

Post by hollander »

sithadmin wrote: post #163
derefr wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Methinks most business owners/managers, especially MBA-types, would see that as giving away sensitive info/competitive advantage to competitors and nix the idea.

Well, "most" is OK, just as long as there are some that think otherwise.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#178

Post by Doxin »

Hasz wrote: post #126
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #28

> And even if it were properly executed, I think I reject the underlying goal of this strategy. The whole purpose of using an Arduino UNO form-factor is to support Arduino shields — yet I have never seen an Arduino shield on the desk of a professional engineer or advanced hobbyist. At least, not one plugged into one of these “Uno form-factor” dev boards. I have to chime in. What's the point of using the UNO form fact…

The code. The shields are pretty worthless, but the availability of libraries and example code is excellent. Instead of working out all the fine details of I2C, I can call a well developed function that takes care of all that for me. Instead of spending days writing a graphics library, I can find an off the shelf GFX library that has more features/is faster/ etc The ability to move quickly with well documented, prebu…

Hint if you're going the no-shields route: Go for the arduino pro mini. It's the same thing in a different format, and a bunch cheaper.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#179

Post by throwawaybbqed »

hathawsh wrote: post #141
jaydcarlson wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With 21 of these parts on my desk, that would have been a good idea. Thanks for linking to a cached version — I'm working to get my little blog on Cloudflare to handle the traffic. I appreciate the kind words from everyone so far; it's been a huge learning opportunity, and I hope others can get inspired to grab one of these parts (especially one of the weirder ones) and do something cool with it.

I would pay for a book version of this work, or at least a PDF that I could print. It would be the kind of book that I could really get into. Fantastic work.

I'd like to second that. I skimmed through this yesterday and about to board a long flight. Frantically caching :-p

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#180

Post by alister »

zo1 wrote: post #151
ashark wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've had this exact experience many times myself and I'm also at a loss to explain how it happens unless Google is (unintentionally) facilitating it. An observation I can add is that the dummy site may not appear on my first search for "very unlikely phrase". But if I keep tweaking my Google search, a dummy site that has "very unlikely phrase" as its title soon appears in the results.
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