Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Arduino Uno R4

blog.arduino.cc

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 136 posts

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#31

Post by qbasic_forever »

dragontamer wrote: post #6
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…

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…

The LEDs on these little development boards are typically big sources of current draw too. Like the main CPU can go into deep sleep sipping microamps of power, but the power and other LEDs sit there with a resistor pulling tens of milliamps all the time.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#32

Post by twawaaay »

sho_hn wrote: post #26
twawaaay wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As an amateur EE I am looking at Arduino as an entry-level solution for people who want to learn a bit about electronics and have fun getting some results.

Arduino is supposed to be simple and it is a feature, not a bug.

If they start making it more and more complicated, it will just stop being simple and it will stop being what makes it so usable to complete noobs.

There is no shortage of options if you somehow find that Arduino is not powerful enough to you.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#33

Post by sho_hn »

twawaaay wrote: post #32
sho_hn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

As an amateur EE I am looking at Arduino as an entry-level solution for people who want to learn a bit about electronics and have fun getting some results. Arduino is supposed to be simple and it is a feature, not a bug. If they start making it more and more complicated, it will just stop being simple and it will stop being what makes it so usable to complete noobs. There is no shortage of options if you somehow find…

Well that's sorta the point - they're making it more complicated here (same name, two completely different BOMs with different behavior). An improvement would be to make power management and low-power projects beginner-friendly (e.g. by expanding the API framework) and a compelling announcement would be showing that off. For me it's still a curious omission.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#34

Post by josephcsible »

AviationAtom wrote: post #29
josephcsible wrote: post #28

IMO, this is so different from the three previous UNOs that they should have made up a new name for it instead of calling it an UNO.

DOS?

They're Italian, so they'd say "due" instead of "dos", which they've already used: https://docs.arduino.cc/hardware/due

Ditto for "tre": https://docs.arduino.cc/retired/boards/arduino-tre

It looks like they haven't used "quattro" themselves, but a popular Arduino-based robotics project has, so using it for a new board would be confusing.

They've used "cinque" too: https://hackaday.com/2017/05/20/arduino-cinque-the-risc-v-es...

"Sei" isn't used, but it'd cause confusion when people search for how to enable interrupts on Arduinos.

So I think "sette" would be the next good candidate if they wanted to name it after a number.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#36

Post by 0xDEF »

microtonal wrote: post #3

These 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…

A low-power ARM MCU like that can run for years. There are wireless sensors based on TI's wireless ARM Cortex-M3 solutions that can run for years before needing a battery replacement.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#37

Post by dale_glass »

szundi wrote: post #27
dale_glass wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course I don't mean I expect a beginner to get a board made so that they can use a surface mount level shifter for their beginner project.

My question here is why the weird approach? Why have two MCUs on a board, and have the one that the user interacts with be the technically inferior one?

Why not just make a better version of the ESPRIT? Just add a level shifter to it, and there you go: form factor compatible, 5V compatible, and more powerful than Arduino's not yet released project. And probably cheaper to manufacture than the two MCU design they came up with.

And yeah, you can use exactly the same IDE and API for the ESP32.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#38

Post by AviationAtom »

josephcsible wrote: post #34
AviationAtom wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DOS?

They're Italian, so they'd say "due" instead of "dos", which they've already used: https://docs.arduino.cc/hardware/due Ditto for "tre": https://docs.arduino.cc/retired/boards/arduino-tre It looks like they haven't used "quattro" themselves, but a popular Arduino-based robotics project has, so using it for a new board would be confusing. They've used "cinque" too: https://hackaday.com/2017/05/20/arduino-cinque-the-ri…

Fair point. My thought process tends to be a bit more biased towards the Espanol than the Italiano.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#39

Post by II2II »

okl wrote: post #8
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…

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.

Yeap. My first attempts to move away from Arduino were an absolute nightmare, even though I treated it as a development board and had ditched the Arduino libraries. There was too much inconsistent information from the community about third-party STM32 boards. ESP32 boards were okay given my skill level, but I certainly wouldn't recommend them for novices. The relatively recent Pi Pico was a refreshing change due to the consistent documentation, but it is something where you have to be willing to sit down and read the documentation. And that is only considering programming the things, you still have to build something around it.

I'm sure there are good alternative to the Arudino out there. Arduino certainly wasn't the first to market with beginner friendly development boards and the popularity of Arudino only attracted more companies to the market. Unfortunately, it would be difficult to figure out who to go with since there is so much meaningless noise out there.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#40

Post by 0xDEF »

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…

I love the ESP32 and use it as the central gateway/hub in the IoT solutions I develop.

However the ESP32 power consumption is too high. TI has an ARM-based wireless sensor platform that can run for years while making measurements every five minutes.

Post reply on HN