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Arduino Uno R4

blog.arduino.cc

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Re: Arduino Uno R4

#21

Post by twawaaay »

sho_hn wrote: post #17
dragontamer wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

I know all of this of course (but nevertheless thanks for spreading useful information) :-) What I'm saying is that I would really like this type of announcement to not take shape of absolute performance increase but at least include, if not focus, on performance-per-watt. I honestly don't agree with the "beginners won't care" - battery life is not a difficult concept and battery-powered projects are super common. An…

20mA is an equivalent of a typical LED. And if that is too much for you to power a microcontroller you do what you do with a normal LED -- you do not power it all the time and instead you use it when it is needed and put to sleep when it is not.

So I fully agree with the parent comment that for an amateur once you got to this point, further improvements on power efficiency here is pretty much inconsequential. It is not like you are going to be building a watch or a sensor that will have to work for years on a single AAA.

A 20mA microcontroller will be sufficient for pretty much any project an amateur can think of, power usage wise.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#22

Post by ta988 »

dale_glass wrote: post #14
okl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The ESP32 can be programmed through the Arduino IDE, using the exact same language. I've done that. Now the ESP32 as usually delivered is not pin or voltage compatible, but surely that's not that hard of a problem. Just make an Arduino shaped board for it, and use a level shifter? In fact this very thing seems to exist: https://freematics.com/store/index.php?route=product/product...

So now you need to add a level shifer increase the number of mistakes and the risk of ruining your board. Your solution makes life of hobbyists less enjoyable IMHO.

The GPIO are not level shifted in the board you link.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#23

Post by sho_hn »

teraflop wrote: post #11
sho_hn wrote: post #2

What'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…

Just from a glance at the microcontroller datasheets, it looks like the RA4M1's current draw in "Software Standby" mode is much lower than the older ATmega328P's "power down" mode (5μA vs. ~50μA). But IIRC, the voltage regulators in previous Arduino boards already waste orders of magnitude more current than that, even while quiescent, making them not very suitable for battery-powered applications. So it remains to be…

One thing that's makes the product line a bit hard to reason about is that they have a Wifi and a non-Wifi version using two very different MCUs with very different power use characteristics. I.e. even if you have Wifi disabled on the Wifi version, it'll behave very differently from the non-Wifi board. People looking up numbers or experiences will have a harder time.

Add to this that afaict, the Arduino framework API currently doesn't provide fantastic abstractions for power/state management either. I had an Arduino-based esp32 project once and extracting best deep sleep performance definitely required reaching lower into ESP-IDF API instead (e.g. the difference between ext0 and ext1 wakeups and being able to shut off RTC memory in one but not the other).

That means with the current framework, you have to potentially write non-portable code between two different versions of the "same Uno R4" if you want to optimize for low power.

All of embedded is like this, really - scanning through and understanding a product line is basically a required skill - but meh, what a mess for beginners.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#24

Post by dale_glass »

ta988 wrote: post #22
dale_glass wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ESP32 can be programmed through the Arduino IDE, using the exact same language. I've done that. Now the ESP32 as usually delivered is not pin or voltage compatible, but surely that's not that hard of a problem. Just make an Arduino shaped board for it, and use a level shifter? In fact this very thing seems to exist: https://freematics.com/store/index.php?route=product/product...

So now you need to add a level shifer increase the number of mistakes and the risk of ruining your board. Your solution makes life of hobbyists less enjoyable IMHO. The GPIO are not level shifted in the board you link.

Maybe that's not the right board, but a level shifter is what, $1 or so? Could be on the board itself easily.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#25

Post by timmaxw »

The Uno is one of the best boards for beginners due to its huge ecosystem of tutorials, accessories, etc. But for a long time the Uno was stuck on the same 8-bit core for backwards-compatibility reasons, even as alternative boards offered much better specs. If the R4 can offer better specs without fragmenting the ecosystem, it will be a winner for beginners IMO.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#26

Post by sho_hn »

twawaaay wrote: post #21
sho_hn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know all of this of course (but nevertheless thanks for spreading useful information) :-) What I'm saying is that I would really like this type of announcement to not take shape of absolute performance increase but at least include, if not focus, on performance-per-watt. I honestly don't agree with the "beginners won't care" - battery life is not a difficult concept and battery-powered projects are super common. An…

20mA is an equivalent of a typical LED. And if that is too much for you to power a microcontroller you do what you do with a normal LED -- you do not power it all the time and instead you use it when it is needed and put to sleep when it is not. So I fully agree with the parent comment that for an amateur once you got to this point, further improvements on power efficiency here is pretty much inconsequential. It is n…

"Putting it to sleep" is where a lot of details matter. Different MCUs don't have parity on what sleep states and options they offer and what they mean in practice. Often there are complex tables where certain wakeup schemes are only available in certain sleep states, and to extract minimum idle draw you need to know what you're doing.

The Arduino framework currently offers only minimal abstraction over this. If you use Arduino on an esp32, you have to reach into ESP-IDF API to dial in the details, e.g. set up ext1 wakeup and disable the RTC memory explicitly if you don't need it. Betting this is the same here at launch.

Arduino here is introducing two versions of the same product with widely different BOMs and not addressing this matter at all.

I think it'd be a great enhancement of their productization effort if they started explaining power envelope, showing improvements over time, standardized an API (derived from actual use cases) etc. This would add value over the raw chips and datasheets for their audience of beginners looking for ease of use. Without it this is just throwing some random new breakout boards with the same layouts over the fence - a very crowded market - and banking on ecosystem effects without evolving the ecosystem and tackling new aspects.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#27

Post by szundi »

dale_glass wrote: post #24
ta988 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now you need to add a level shifer increase the number of mistakes and the risk of ruining your board. Your solution makes life of hobbyists less enjoyable IMHO. The GPIO are not level shifted in the board you link.

Maybe that's not the right board, but a level shifter is what, $1 or so? Could be on the board itself easily.

Please try to imagine you are a begginner again.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#30

Post by drivers99 »

numpad0 wrote: post #13
dale_glass wrote: post #5

A 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…

But can you plug an ESP32 to HEW through the official $1k ICE?

Trying to understand your statement. What do HEW and ICE stand for? Google isn’t helping.
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