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Arduino DUE (32 bit) Now Available

store.arduino.cc

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Re: Arduino DUE (32 bit) Now Available

#21

Post by anigbrowl »

vonmoltke wrote: post #3
agl wrote: post #2

€60 for shipping to US seems a little much for shipping 60 grams taking a week. Sadly none of the distributors seem to have it yet. Seems like we'll have to wait a little while longer still.

Take that up with UPS. I ran their shipping calculator for Rome to Dallas and got rates well in excess of that[1], so either they are eating part of the shipping or they have a preferred rate. [1] Cheapest I saw was $109 (83 euros)

I think the problem is that they specified UPS express, which is one of their high speed delivery options (overniight within US, 2-3 days global point-to-point). I'd be perfectly OK with waiting a week for shipping by postal mail, but the Arduino folk don't offer a low-cost option.

Re: Arduino DUE (32 bit) Now Available

#23

Post by anigbrowl »

jrockway wrote: post #15

You might also consider a STM32F4DISCOVERY board: http://www.st.com/internet/evalboard/product/252419.jsp This is also a ARM Cortex board but it's $15 and in stock everywhere. (I think it's more powerful and has more features than the Due, but I haven't checked in detail. At $15, though, it can't be beat. And there are less powerful boards in the series that are even cheaper!)

I've been looking at several uCs, in particular the Cypress Semi PSoC5 system for the system-on-chip functionality and the great toolchain, but also the very cheap TI Stellaris series. But there are so many highly capable products out there these days, it's hard to know which one is the best; I feel like a first-time computer buyer trying to choose between Mac and Windows without really knowing much about either.

Are there any resources you'd recommend for people trying to choose their development platform? I have specific reasons for liking the cypress system-on-chips (massive i/o, extensive software config capabilities, toolchain support for my intended application of audio/MIDI), but it's hard to size up all the different options.

Re: Arduino DUE (32 bit) Now Available

#25

Post by ChuckMcM »

jrockway wrote: post #15

You might also consider a STM32F4DISCOVERY board: http://www.st.com/internet/evalboard/product/252419.jsp This is also a ARM Cortex board but it's $15 and in stock everywhere. (I think it's more powerful and has more features than the Due, but I haven't checked in detail. At $15, though, it can't be beat. And there are less powerful boards in the series that are even cheaper!)

Came to say something similar. We've not really felt the impact that ARM is going to make in this space yet but its here.

It is fascinating to see what the various ARM chip makers have included (or not) on their chips and how. The ST Micro guys seem to 'get' that a lot of RAM is a good thing for prototyping. I've got one of their Butterfly boards (STM32F4DISCOVERY [1]) and the 192K of RAM is nice for doing development work. It doesn't have the Arduino software stack though.

The Stellaris parts seem a bit more resource constrained (I've got one of those too :-) Basically there are a number of different ARM parts that make for easy to use, inexpensive, embedded systems.

On the Due I'm glad they brought out the JTAG connector because you can get a nice JTAG debugging pod (SAM-ICE) which is a relabeled Segger pod for not much money. Getting debug support on something other than windows for some of the other parts is a bit dicey.

[1] http://www.st.com/internet/com/TECHNICAL_RESOURCES/TECHNICAL...

Re: Arduino DUE (32 bit) Now Available

#27

Post by lgeek »

jrockway wrote: post #15

You might also consider a STM32F4DISCOVERY board: http://www.st.com/internet/evalboard/product/252419.jsp This is also a ARM Cortex board but it's $15 and in stock everywhere. (I think it's more powerful and has more features than the Due, but I haven't checked in detail. At $15, though, it can't be beat. And there are less powerful boards in the series that are even cheaper!)

I'll second this recommandation. This kit became is my go-to choice for prototyping more complex microcontroller projects. Plenty of peripherals, flexible pin muxing, good documentation and the ARM core is quite fast. Finally, I almost forgot about the open source HW debugger to GDB bridge[0].

I actually wrote a set of drivers, libraries and a build system to allow easy prototyping (like Arduino) but also enable access to the more complex features of the SoC.

[0] https://github.com/texane/stlink

Re: Arduino DUE (32 bit) Now Available

#29

Post by jrockway »

anigbrowl wrote: post #23
jrockway wrote: post #15

You might also consider a STM32F4DISCOVERY board: http://www.st.com/internet/evalboard/product/252419.jsp This is also a ARM Cortex board but it's $15 and in stock everywhere. (I think it's more powerful and has more features than the Due, but I haven't checked in detail. At $15, though, it can't be beat. And there are less powerful boards in the series that are even cheaper!)

I've been looking at several uCs, in particular the Cypress Semi PSoC5 system for the system-on-chip functionality and the great toolchain, but also the very cheap TI Stellaris series. But there are so many highly capable products out there these days, it's hard to know which one is the best; I feel like a first-time computer buyer trying to choose between Mac and Windows without really knowing much about either. Are…

I'd just say: try them. I learned microcontrollers with Basic stamps (many years ago), bought a Teensy a few years ago and learned AVR (avoiding Arduino for various reasons), and am now learning the STM ARM stuff.

My biggest takeaway is that teaching hardware people about unit tests would make humanity as a whole about 93% more productive :)

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