The New Altair: Why the Arduino Matters • Hacker News Board

Re: The New Altair: Why the Arduino Matters

#31

Post by woadwarrior01 » Sat, May 23, 2009, 12:01 PM UTC

ladyada wrote: post #18

woadwarrior01 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the Arduino is little overhyped. It isn't too hard to build your own PIC or AVR programmer on a veroboard and start hacking. I find the BeagleBoard to be a lot more promising/interesting given the amount of raw processing power you get on a tiny 3"x3" board.

"It isn't too hard to build your own PIC or AVR programmer on a veroboard and start hacking. " Actually, it is. People who are 'starting hacking' dont know how to hack, so they dont clock, power or wire their chips correctly. They don't have a scope so its impossible to debug, especially when there are multiple unknowns (power, clock, wiring, programmer, progammer driver, programming software, compiler, code) "I find…

Well, I think I was being a little elitist. I guess there's this tendency among people like me which goes like "I was forced to learn things the hard way and hence its good to learn things hard way".

But back when I started, I was just a cash strapped high school kid who happend to find a couple of PIC16F84s. And I had lots of fun building a simple parallel port programmer and playing with them.

My next pet project involves a beagle board and 4 AT2313s driving 4 brushless motors. Just waiting for my beagle board. The beagle board does have a couple of GPIOs and 3 PWMs, so blinking an led or driving a servo should be possible :)

Re: The New Altair: Why the Arduino Matters

#32

Post by aswanson » Sat, May 23, 2009, 5:27 PM UTC

mellis wrote: post #28

As one of the creators of Arduino (and currently its lead software developer), I'm happy to see such a lively discussion of the platform. I'd also love to hear any suggestions you might have for improving it. I should note that we've done very little promotion ourselves, apart from teaching lots of people to use it in various workshops. Of course, we're happy that Make is such a fan. One interesting feature of the pl…

I think you should start making boards based upon the AT90USB162 processor. USB capabable, cheap micros are increasingly important for new products.

Other than that, good work! I am a fan.

Re: The New Altair: Why the Arduino Matters

#33

Post by ralph » Sun, May 24, 2009, 12:28 PM UTC

jrbedard wrote: post #17

lallysingh wrote: post #4

In comparison: http://www.xgamestation.com/ Build your own video game system, run atari-esqe games on there. More avenues for fun in my book.

yes, and I highly recommend reading André LaMothe's books (xgamestation's sole creator) and his posts on the xgamestation forum (user necron). He's an highly skilled hacker and entrepreneur.

The xgamestation products seem good, but the website is awful. I've been there on and off several times over the years and never purchased anything because I've given up. There's now quite a few different products, but not a good overview of the differences. And the faux game look and feel is tedious and hard to read. View -> Page Style -> No Style helps somewhat.

Re: The New Altair: Why the Arduino Matters

#34

Post by HeyLaughingBoy » Tue, May 26, 2009, 1:33 AM UTC

ladyada wrote: post #16

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90% of everything that I've seen done with the Arduino (that doesn't require portability) can be done with an old PC that has a parallel port and any Linux distro that has gcc. I'm not dissing the Arduino; I think it's an interesting platform, but it really is overhyped.

a PC doesn't have analog inputs, cant do PWM outputs, struggles with protocols like i2c, isnt realtime. but it is: loud, hard to enclose nicely, costs more and requires maintenance.

And none of what you've said falls into the 90% of what I've seen done with an Arduino.