Excellent article! Thank you.
One of the few i will be consulting regularly.
The Amazing $1 Microcontroller (2017)
141–150 of 199 posts
Re: The Amazing $1 Microcontroller (2017)
#142Obligatory mention of ESP32. It might not be $1 but it's definitely worth being aware of.
I picked up a few ESP01 boards from Aliexpress recently, they're less than $1.50 each. They only have two GPIO pins accessible (and one needs a pull-up resistor to make the ESP8266 boot properly) but for toggling a relay or reading a simple sensor over wifi they're hard to beat. They're even powerful enough to run a basic HTTP server to handle a light web interface for the GPIO.
Re: The Amazing $1 Microcontroller (2017)
#143Anybody know any awesome cheap Raspberry Pi Zero W alternatives? Primarily looking for something ultra cheap, tiny form factor, not especially power-hungry, able to run not-too-weird flavors of linux, and preferably with (wireless) networking.
Re: The Amazing $1 Microcontroller (2017)
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm doing the same thing now. I bet your people think you're as crazy as my people think of me. My other friends are spending thousands of dollars retrofitting lighting and everything when they could spend a fraction and write some code. And learn a skill. And not have their privacy invaded. And have more money they always complain about not having enough of.
What's your hourly rate? I've got a Google Home and LIFX bulbs, but I've also spent hundreds and hundreds of hours learning, tinkering and coding. I can do this because I'm single and am lucky enough to have a lot of free time. If I was doing it again, I'd stick with the LIFX bulbs and use the hundreds of hours doing something that would earn me some money.
Invest those extra hours inventing something! :)
Then you can sell your hours over and over again.
Re: The Amazing $1 Microcontroller (2017)
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm doing the same thing now. I bet your people think you're as crazy as my people think of me. My other friends are spending thousands of dollars retrofitting lighting and everything when they could spend a fraction and write some code. And learn a skill. And not have their privacy invaded. And have more money they always complain about not having enough of.
> I bet your people think you're as crazy as my people think of me. For one year, it was constant annoying discouragement. Then, once we had this party in my house and I showed it off to everyone and they finally realized its worth. To me, the privacy factor is alone worth doing this project.
Me too. A neat part of it is being able to share what I've built and get and feel the appreciation for what I've done.
It's not like that in my software life. Like databases are not as... neat to most people but everyone can appreciate something they can see and touch and control.
Re: The Amazing $1 Microcontroller (2017)
#146I feel obligated to mention in every one of these threads the wemos D1. I actually have a tough time explaining just how incredible this board is. You can program it in the Arduino environment, meaning if you are doing any hobby electronics, you're probably already really familiar with the programming modalities. It comes with a programmer, and power regulator. No fussing with anything like you might have to with a b…
I'm using a ESP8266 board from a local shop, $17, I knew you can get cheaper on Ali but starting out I like not to wait and not worry so much about quality. However I will look into these for future boards.
I set up a thermal sensor that updates a Parse (remember them!) clone. Working well but sometimes it just stops updating, not sure if it is the device or the Parse clone's fault or a bit of both. But it works nicely for a day or so at a time.
Just a reminder things might not go smoothly with these devices, they are tricky to debug if they crash. When you are communicating via http the apis are not as nice as I am used to on the desktop.
Re: The Amazing $1 Microcontroller (2017)
#147Anybody know any awesome cheap Raspberry Pi Zero W alternatives? Primarily looking for something ultra cheap, tiny form factor, not especially power-hungry, able to run not-too-weird flavors of linux, and preferably with (wireless) networking.
Have you seen the VoCore2? Ameridroid has them in stock.
Re: The Amazing $1 Microcontroller (2017)
#148It is really mind-bogging how fast processors are these days. A few days ago I read the marketing copy for the iPad Pro on the Apple website, where they said that their neural processor can perform more than five trillion operations per second. Initially I thought they translated it wrong from English to German (one trillion is "eine Billion" in German), but I rechecked it and it seems correct and actually makes sense for a highly parallel architecture that runs at a few GHz per second. Granted it costs more than $1 (though the production cost without factoring in R&D might actually be in that range) but it's still amazing that you can just carry such a thing around in your pocket.
Re: The Amazing $1 Microcontroller (2017)
#149My favorite is the ATTINY 85. It's so cheap and yet, it can do almost most of the things you can do an Arduino. And yes, you can program it using the Arduino IDE as well. Last year, I started out to digitalize my entire house with these tiny ATTINY 85 chips and with some nrF wireless chips. It has worked really well for me and I'm able to control and monitor any power port in my house as well as my mains. The overall…
Are you in the United States? I'm just curious how your homeowner's insurance feels about this? That is, will they still pay out for a claim should something happen, and they determine your modifications were at fault? Because if the adjuster or whomever does find you have such modifications - they -will- blame those. And probably deny your claim and coverage (and probably cancel your policy). At least that would lik…
"Because if the adjuster or whomever does find you have such modifications - they -will- blame those.
And probably deny your claim and coverage (and probably cancel your policy)."
I'm skeptical that an insurance company will be able to determine exactly what part you used and if it was UL listed unless you yourself tell them
Re: The Amazing $1 Microcontroller (2017)
#150I would love to see a comparison of instruction sets for assembly programming. Sure, only a few people are going to program in asm, but a microcontroller is the best way to play with it. The MSP430 instruction set is somewhat friendly, but I long for the days of the Motorola MC68hc11. That was a beautiful instruction set, especially for teaching. Does anybody know how these chips fare for raw assembly programming?
The AVR instruction set is reasonably nice for hand-coding (and has a more modern feel to it than the 'HC11, which may be relevant if you're using it as a teaching example). I haven't used PICs since the PIC14 days; it was a painfully minimalist ISA like the 6502; the newer PICs are better, I gather.
The ARM set isn't unpleasant but it's definitely a modern set designed as a compiler target rather than for hand coding, and most ARM chips are large enough there's no real reason not to use a compiler for almost all the code.