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Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

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Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#111
post #11

~$100 ARM M7 at 480MHz and ARM M4 at 240MHz 2MB SDRAM 16MB Flash USB, host and device WiFi Bluetooth 10/100 Ethernet MIPI DSI lcd panel DisplayPort over USB-C (graphics out) Integrated Li-Po charger 3x ADC 16 bit 2x DAC 12 bit, 1MHz 4x UART 22x Timers 2.95µA in standby mode That's obviously way too much to come out of the Arduino style pins. There are two 80 pin high density connectors on the back which have everythi…

The price seems very high for the category.

the product starts a 49. it's an industrial product with industrial temperature grade parts. it's also a quantity 1 price. if you buy in bulk directly the price comes down

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#112
post #4

Not trying to troll - just don't know. Why would anybody use an Arduino versus a five dollar Raspberry Pi Zero?

>Why would anybody use an Arduino versus a five dollar Raspberry Pi Zero?

1. The $5 Raspberry Pi Zero isn't really $5.

2. The fact that the $5 advertised price isn't the real price, and the inventory games they play raises ethical problems for some people.

3. You can get an Arduino clone for less than $2 (for real, and in bulk).

4. The Pi and other SBCs have higher power requirements, so they can't reliably run off AA batteries.

5. The Pi also requires an SD card, increasing the cost.

6. The Arduino comes in many form factors which are considerably smaller than SBCs.

7. The two aren't drop in replacements, the Pi runs a "real" opperating system that does a lot of things in the background. So communicating with other devices which have specific timing requirements is significantly more difficult on the Pi.

8. The market for Arduino "shields" is much more competitive than the Pi "hats".

9. There are just a lot more shields and sensors available designed to interface with the Arduino

10. The Pi's IO pins are 3.3v, where the Arduino's are (on most boards) 5v. So using sensors/boards designed for the Arduino requires a level shifter

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#113
post #97
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an industrial environment price is usually less relevant, or even irrelevant. Reliability is key here. Downtime of a machine can quickly rack up huge costs, so you want to spend extra on hardware that can resist greater temperature ranges, vibration, radiation, magnetism, moisture, etc.

Reliability is key. But is the quality of the Arduino software/libraries good enough ?

this board runs MbedOs from arm which is a very robust Rtos with very advanced features. The the individual quality of libraries depends on the author like in any open source project.

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#114
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which in my opinion makes the "goes pro" statement misleading. Without proper JTAG/SWD debugging functionalities, how do you program anything serious on Arduino?

we released the beta Pro IDE with JTAG debugging capabilities. we have a powerful cli written in go which lets you compile /upload your code very simplt with whatever IDE you like the most. This board is certified for industrial temperature and other industrial certification are being done now.

Oh I wasn't aware of these, it looks awesome - thank you!

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#115
post #4

Not trying to troll - just don't know. Why would anybody use an Arduino versus a five dollar Raspberry Pi Zero?

Arduino is a much simpler device. Pi is a full linux computer, as opposed to Arduino which is a microcontroller.

this product doesn't follow the classic definition of microcontroller. (you can rve run a version of Linux on this thing)

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#116
post #4

Not trying to troll - just don't know. Why would anybody use an Arduino versus a five dollar Raspberry Pi Zero?

> five dollar Raspberry Pi Zero They still need an SD card to function. So, that price is going to double at a minimum.

the pi is a great device but it's a consumer grade device. there are number of use cases it doesn't support very well (low power, realtime , industrial operational temperature etc)

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point of having the M4 cores alongside the M7 though, isn't it? Let the M4's handle real-time stuff like driving motors, and the M7 do communication and/or user interface.

Do they share a memory bus? How do they contend with devices? Can an interrupt or memory access on the M7 core cause the M4 core to miss a critical timing? If so it's not really a good design. If it's two totally independent cores with totally independent sets of devices, how do you manage the pinmux? Are there independent pinmuxes? And finally is the M4 core capable of detecting single-faults in the cache, memory, f…

I tried reading the datasheet and they could have spelled out a lot of these things a bit more clearly I think.

As far as I can see they have mostly separate memory busses, and a lot of the peripherals can only be accessed directly by either the M7 or the M4. Though there is some cross-bus access and how that works I have no idea.

They specify that all the SRAM memory and Flash uses ECC, but no mention of the registers that I could spot.

By no means a simple chip to wrap ones head around, but certainly looks interesting. Pricing of the Arduino though... not for me, at that price I'd rather take the RPi plus some extension board.

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#118
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure that class of equipment will not be using any kind of Arduino board (see also: certifications above).

HN commenters love to talk about how Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards aren't suitable for use in production hardware. I recently had a chance to wander around one of the bigger EMS factories in the Bay Area, rubbernecking at everybody else's products in various stages of assembly. It's safe to say not many naysaying HN'ers have done that recently, or they would be saying something very different.

The comment I was replying to was talking about DEATHS being caused by failure, not environmental sensors. I have nothing against its use.

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#119
post #90
post #50

>The Portenta H7 is capable of running Arduino code, Python and JavaScript, making it accessible to an even broader audience of developers. "Here, now you can buy hardware that enables you to hire bootcamp-level devs to do your professional industrial work. That way you can pay non-professional wages for professional-level work!" Stop normalizing putting bloated, heavy languages on embedded platforms.

Arudino isn't great as a platform for industrial work anyways - most industrial applications will spin their own boards or run higher end PLCs that have more rugged designs and protections built in for industrial environments. Arudino however is great as an experimentation platform, where having access to things like a Python or JS REPL can make experimentation a pleasure, being able to rapidly update and prototype i…

Respectfully what you say it's not entirely true. this product family is the response to the emergence of a lot of industrial automation projects that are built on Arduino hardware. Not everyone is building a nuclear plant or an artificial lung but there are plenty of SME companies solving problems with Arduino

Re: Arduino Goes Pro at CES 2020

#120
post #50

>The Portenta H7 is capable of running Arduino code, Python and JavaScript, making it accessible to an even broader audience of developers. "Here, now you can buy hardware that enables you to hire bootcamp-level devs to do your professional industrial work. That way you can pay non-professional wages for professional-level work!" Stop normalizing putting bloated, heavy languages on embedded platforms.

Your phrasing is snarky, but you make a reasonable point. Arduino performance is already atrocious with C and it's only going to get worse with a higher-level language.

atrocious ??, maybe on an 8 bit 8mhz device you can go faster if you write optimised assembly code but this is a 240Mhz+480Mhz device it's a different world....
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