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Arduino Uno R4

blog.arduino.cc

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Re: Arduino Uno R4

#51

Post by twawaaay »

sho_hn wrote: post #33
twawaaay wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nah, two different BOMs isn't making it more complicated. In the end you hold a board in your hand and have to figure out how to get from it to what you want.

Or think in a different way: A board you have in your hand does not suddenly become more complicated because the company comes up with another board with different BOM. Maybe choosing the board becomes a bit more complicated, maybe choosing any addons for the boards becomes a bit more complicated (as you have to navigate compatibility), but using the board -- I don't think so.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#52

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

eternityforest wrote: post #19
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…

Seems like the big feature is 5v compatibility. Most ESP32 boards don't have 5v level shifting.

5V is the special feature but it only has 20mA sink/source on two pins. That's not particularly friendly for typical Uno applications.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#53

Post by mardifoufs »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #52
eternityforest wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like the big feature is 5v compatibility. Most ESP32 boards don't have 5v level shifting.

5V is the special feature but it only has 20mA sink/source on two pins. That's not particularly friendly for typical Uno applications.

Does that mean it can only output 20ma at 5v? Or the opposite?

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#54

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

mardifoufs wrote: post #53
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5V is the special feature but it only has 20mA sink/source on two pins. That's not particularly friendly for typical Uno applications.

Does that mean it can only output 20ma at 5v? Or the opposite?

It means people are going to blow pins thinking they can drive an LED at 20mA from any output.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#56

Post by mardifoufs »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #10
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…

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.

Is that true outside of the original board? I never see or hear about the newer arduino variants, to the point where I thought they semi-pivoted to become a more enterprise/industrial oriented offering. It might be selection biais, but it's not very hard to gauge "hobby" usage (youtubers, guides, subreddits, forums) and yet even the bluepill or esp32 are much more common in those circles than the newer arduino boards.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#57

Post by numpad0 »

dale_glass wrote: post #37
szundi wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, 5…

Renesas had been trying to get into Arduino market, previously with Gadget Renesas efforts. Arduino is expanding more into (over-bloated...) industrial control applications for heavy industries. There, I would assume, the both parties saw aligned interests to have a Renesas chip in the center of a new Arduino(maybe ARM might be in it too).

Performance must have been a non-issue, they make everything from timers for rice cookers to custom ISA smartphone SoCs. It must have been just an option that is good enough, easily available and comfortably low-tech to let to an enthusiast with an SEM in his basement.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#58

Post by mNovak »

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…

I agree, considering that much of their marketing surrounds DIY automation and they have this whole IoT cloud platform now, they very little support for low-power operation. In this regard I think Adafuit and Seeed platforms do much better, while still being very beginner friendly.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#59

Post by qwertox »

How popular are Arduinos nowadays? I've used them years ago and they were great, they taught me about how to program and use the ATMegas and generally how to program close to hardware.

But then the Raspberry Pis came along and showed me how useful more processing power is, and for the microcontroller stuff the ESP8266 and then the ESP32 showed me that having WiFi directly on the MCU is so much better than just an Arduino, for which I used to buy really long cables. There was a time when I then paired Arduinos with ESP8266 in order to integrate them into the network, but since the ESP32 I've never looked back.

And yet I see new Arduinos being offered and just wonder who is buying them nowadays. Since I haven't informed myself for years on them, maybe I'm really missing out on something?

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#60

Post by numpad0 »

inamberclad wrote: post #55
ohazi wrote: post #47

What's up with the yellow rectangle?

Caught my eye too. Looks like they're hiding part of the board design?

From the link:

  > The board provides a CAN bus, which allows users to minimize wiring and execute different tasks in parallel by connecting multiple shields.
From [0]:

  > The Renesas RA4M1 group of micrcontrollers (MCUs) uses the high-performance Arm® Cortex®-M4 core and offers a segment LCD controller and a capacitive touch sensing unit input for intensive HMI designs.
Maybe a CAN bus connector, or finally a builtin user interface, if it's not just a power circuit? Built-in LCD/OLED, buttons, basic shell casing and end-user usable expansion connectors are growing trends among China/Shenzhen originating platforms like M5Stack. Arduino is still relying on hacky solutions for UI, which might be less appealing for casual users.

0: https://www.renesas.com/us/en/products/microcontrollers-micr...

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