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Arduino Uno R4

blog.arduino.cc

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Re: Arduino Uno R4

#41

Post by DeathArrow »

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 think Arduino and ESP32 have different goals. One is more of an educational tool targeting children and adults to automate simple stuff and learning to program microcontrollers in a simplified way and the other is focusing on more industrial solutions where performance, price and flexibility matters.

So I am not sure they are competitors. Like Intel and Raspberry Pi aren't competitors as they address very different markets.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#42

Post by DeathArrow »

0xDEF wrote: post #40
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.

ESP has more than ESP32 microcontrollers. They also have lower power microcontrollers and even RISC-V based microcontrollers.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#43

Post by tiedieconderoga »

At first I thought it was really strange that they chose a slow Renesas MCU, while also including an ESP32 module.

Arduino has always been priced at an extreme premium which they justified by publishing easy-to-use software libraries, though.

Maybe it's good that we'll have a widely-supported hobby board that uses something besides Microchip/ST/Espressif. Maybe with a more diverse ecosystem, we could see a decent vendor-agnostic HAL someday.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#44

Post by II2II »

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.

I think the suggestion is to make an electrically compatible Uno board by incorporating the level shifters onto the board. The end user wouldn't have to think about them because they are already there.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#45

Post by [deleted] »

DeathArrow wrote: post #41
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 think Arduino and ESP32 have different goals. One is more of an educational tool targeting children and adults to automate simple stuff and learning to program microcontrollers in a simplified way and the other is focusing on more industrial solutions where performance, price and flexibility matters. So I am not sure they are competitors. Like Intel and Raspberry Pi aren't competitors as they address very different…

[deleted]

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#46

Post by nfriedly »

sho_hn wrote: post #23
teraflop wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I could be wrong, but my reading of the post was that the Wi-Fi version has two MCUs - the main RA4M1, and the S3 WiFi module. So, if you turn off wi-fi, they should be effectively the same board.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#48

Post by II2II »

drivers99 wrote: post #30
numpad0 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I assume they are talking about this:

https://www.renesas.com/us/en/software-tool/high-performance...

And ICE would be an In-Circuit Emulator.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#49

Post by zamadatix »

DeathArrow wrote: post #41
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 think Arduino and ESP32 have different goals. One is more of an educational tool targeting children and adults to automate simple stuff and learning to program microcontrollers in a simplified way and the other is focusing on more industrial solutions where performance, price and flexibility matters. So I am not sure they are competitors. Like Intel and Raspberry Pi aren't competitors as they address very different…

Addressing specific markets only works if you do it uniquely or better. The simplified Arduino tooling works on the ESP32, which is also the cheaper and better option.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#50

Post by numpad0 »

okl wrote: post #18
numpad0 wrote: post #9

Should 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?

If you take a look at the Renesas website, you'll find that the product names look like this: "R7FA4M1AB3CFL#HA0". Renesas has a larger portfolio including, e.g., RISC-V chips. What's the problem?

The pain. Of messing with Japanese traditional companies.
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