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Arduino Uno R4

blog.arduino.cc

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Re: Arduino Uno R4

#61

Post by londons_explore »

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.

The original ATMEGA328p may have said in the datasheet that it could only do 20mA for 2 pins...

But in reality, you can short all the pins to GND and then output high on all of them, and the chip survives indefinitely (although does get rather hot!).

It's really rather nice and robust.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#62

Post by dark-star »

numpad0 wrote: post #50
okl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

can you elaborate? I have used plenty of Renesas-powered devices in the past and didn't have any problems...

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#63

Post by dale_glass »

numpad0 wrote: post #57
dale_glass wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Okay, now that finally makes some sense!

Though does Arduino really amount to something measurable to a giant like Renesas? And I presume that Arduino plans to keep the IDE and API, so not like 99% of people would be learning anything about the details of Renesas' chips.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#64

Post by microtonal »

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…

One is more of an educational tool targeting children and adults to automate simple stuff and learning to program microcontrollers in a simplified way

Ok, but then Micro:Bit is much nicer. It has a Nordic nRF52833, so Bluetooth LE, accelerometer, magnetometer, MEMS microphone, buzzer, 5x5 led matrix, tactile push buttons, and a touch sensor button. And it's easy to program with MakeCode (our daughter programmed it when she was 5 or 6) and MicroPython. It's easy to program, supports crocodile chips. And even the bundle with battery holder and batteries is cheaper than an Uno.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#65

Post by wombat_trouble »

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…

I'd wager that 99% of Arduino enthusiasts (and a good percentage of industrial hw engineers...) do not have a habit of using power save modes on bare metal.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#66

Post by Avamander »

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…

The ESP32 and ESP8266 are significantly more complex and come with a bunch of downsides that make an already difficult venture into the "hardware land" even more so. Watchdog timeout or some other exception, you'll get a stacktrace that requires a fragile Java piece of software to decode, and it only does that to some extent. It's seriously not pleasant.

In my anecdotal experience the ESPs are also not as robust against mistreatment as the AVRs are. According to the datasheet they shouldn't survive as much as they seem to.

So while the hardware might be better, and there is always better hardware out there, it's sometimes worth to avoid the complexity.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#67

Post by Avamander »

II2II wrote: post #39
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.

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 t…

The Arduino hardware abstraction layer has really been one of the biggest steps towards a more universal and interoperable set of software for bare silicon. Yet as you experienced, even then it wasn't enough to bridge the gap fully.

The fact that we call other boards "Arduino alternatives" is partially a testament to that. (Say, instead of "AVR alternatives")

It's certainly not perfect, always the fastest, doesn't expose all the features one might need, but it makes prototyping and portability oh so much easier. I'm glad we have something.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#68

Post by Avamander »

DeathArrow wrote: post #42
0xDEF wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've used a lot of them, I've used various boards in education. Few alternatives offer as mature and smooth experience that Arduino (AVR) boards do.

That's not to say there aren't some great ones out there, but any stumbling stones as a beginner might as well be cliffs.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#69

Post by microtonal »

0xDEF wrote: post #36
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.

The Renesas uses 5µA/11.4µA with peripheral clocks disabled/enabled. The ESP32 2.5µA/10µA respectively. So it does even slightly better.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#70

Post by clort »

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.

can you name it please? I'm interested in a hobbyist project and although I haven't got up off my arse yet, I might one day...
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