Arduino Uno R4
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Arduino Uno R4
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Re: Arduino Uno R4
#2What's missing from this announcement for me is a comparison of current draw, sleep states, etc.
It's nice to get more powerful within a form factor and voltage and so on, and I realize many applications don't care about energy use, but increasingly the metric I care about with DIY/MCU gear (and my phone and my laptop is) "watt-for-watt performance increase".
With DIY stuff especially because I build battery-powered things here and there, and recharging once a year instead of once a month is a massive reduction in nuisance for stuff around the house. I dream of low power compute where I can consistently get away with solar or kinetic energy harvesting to reduce operational maintenance to 0!
Re: Arduino Uno R4
#3These boards confuse me so much. The microcontroller is a Renesas RA4M1 running at 48MHz. However, the Wifi version uses an Espressif S3 module. However the S3 is a dual core microcontroller that runs up to 240 MHz. Why not base the board on that, or perhaps even the RISC-V version of ESP32? ESP32 has plenty of pins, deep sleep, etc.
Is it only to keep pinout/5V compatibility with older Unos? I think their bigger problem is that there are a lot of good competitors now and their boards are severely overpriced for what they offer.
Re: Arduino Uno R4
#4These boards confuse me so much. The microcontroller is a Renesas RA4M1 running at 48MHz. However, the Wifi version uses an Espressif S3 module. However the S3 is a dual core microcontroller that runs up to 240 MHz. Why not base the board on that, or perhaps even the RISC-V version of ESP32? ESP32 has plenty of pins, deep sleep, etc. Is it only to keep pinout/5V compatibility with older Unos? I think their bigger pro…
if they weren't going to keep compatibility, there would be no point in going with the same form factor (and they could fix the awkward spacing that one of the headers has) - this is meant as something that will work with the various shields that are available.
Re: Arduino Uno R4
#5A nice improvement, but maybe too little too late?
I mean, what's the point? An ESP32 has 320K SRAM, 448K Flash and a 240 MHz dual core CPU. And it costs peanuts. That's the competition to beat, and this doesn't reach it, even though the ESP32 came out in 2016.
The Arduino has been resting on its laurels for too long, I'm afraid. There's long been things out there much faster and cheaper, and with wifi out there for a long time.
EDIT: And why not just use one of these, which is already for sale?
https://freematics.com/store/index.php?route=product/product...
Re: Arduino Uno R4
#6What's missing from this announcement for me is a comparison of current draw, sleep states, etc. It's nice to get more powerful within a form factor and voltage and so on, and I realize many applications don't care about energy use, but increasingly the metric I care about with DIY/MCU gear (and my phone and my laptop is) "watt-for-watt performance increase". With DIY stuff especially because I build battery-powered…
The microcontroller is under 20mA easily, and under 10mA typical use.
https://www.renesas.com/us/en/document/mah/renesas-ra4m1-gro...
I'm a bit lothe to admit it, but for beginners... anything under 50mA probably doesn't matter. So that includes Teensy Boards, RP2040, Arduino Uno, this new Arduino, etc. etc. A typical LED draws 20mA for example, while WiFi will draw 100mA or more. Ethernet also draws 100mA+.
So its very difficult for a beginner to "care" about anything below 50mA. Its just not something worth caring about, because everything else in your circuit uses so much more power.
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> With DIY stuff especially because I build battery-powered things here and there, and recharging once a year instead of once a month is a massive reduction in nuisance for stuff around the house. I dream of low power compute where I can consistently get away with solar or kinetic energy harvesting to reduce operational maintenance to 0!
Just search on UltraLowPower (ULP) microcontrollers, such as the STM32L5 (or the next version: STM32U5, whenever that comes out). Low-power microcontrollers are measured in "microamps per MHz".
https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32...
That's 16uA / MHz active on the STM32U5. Though it fails at the lower end of things (~1mA or ~2mA is just the cost of the clock itself, so you can't drop below that in active mode. Sleep modes turn off the clock of course and allow the ~100nA to 500nA sleep modes on these ULP chips though).
STM32U5 isn't alone btw. There's plenty of competitors for this ultra-low power field.
Re: Arduino Uno R4
#7These boards confuse me so much. The microcontroller is a Renesas RA4M1 running at 48MHz. However, the Wifi version uses an Espressif S3 module. However the S3 is a dual core microcontroller that runs up to 240 MHz. Why not base the board on that, or perhaps even the RISC-V version of ESP32? ESP32 has plenty of pins, deep sleep, etc. Is it only to keep pinout/5V compatibility with older Unos? I think their bigger pro…
Exactly my thought, this seems like a bunch of design compromises mostly towards backwards-compatibility, but I suspect they also did not want to make their flagship product reliant on a chinese MCU, hence the no-wifi variant.
Re: Arduino Uno R4
#8A nice improvement, but maybe too little too late? I mean, what's the point? An ESP32 has 320K SRAM, 448K Flash and a 240 MHz dual core CPU. And it costs peanuts. That's the competition to beat, and this doesn't reach it, even though the ESP32 came out in 2016. The Arduino has been resting on its laurels for too long, I'm afraid. There's long been things out there much faster and cheaper, and with wifi out there for…
I'm not into Arduinos but I think they are not selling their products because they have the largest RAM or the fastest CPU but because of the Arduino IDE, the language and the community.
Re: Arduino Uno R4
#9Should I feel relieved that the main chip is not carrying scary prefixes and suffixes like CXD, APQ, uPD, MB, etc., or be absolutely horrified still that it’s a Renesas built ARM?
Re: Arduino Uno R4
#10A nice improvement, but maybe too little too late? I mean, what's the point? An ESP32 has 320K SRAM, 448K Flash and a 240 MHz dual core CPU. And it costs peanuts. That's the competition to beat, and this doesn't reach it, even though the ESP32 came out in 2016. The Arduino has been resting on its laurels for too long, I'm afraid. There's long been things out there much faster and cheaper, and with wifi out there for…
You assume that technical specifications determine success - which, as Apple has shown, isn’t true.
Arduino is still unbeatable for community support, tutorials, and plug-and-play programming.