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Arduino Uno R4

blog.arduino.cc

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Re: Arduino Uno R4

#111

Post by hungryforcodes »

londons_explore wrote: post #61
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.

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.

You can do exactly the same to an ESP32 / 8266.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#112

Post by hungryforcodes »

ta988 wrote: post #22
dale_glass wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ESP32 can be programmed through the Arduino IDE, using the exact same language. I've done that. Now the ESP32 as usually delivered is not pin or voltage compatible, but surely that's not that hard of a problem. Just make an Arduino shaped board for it, and use a level shifter? In fact this very thing seems to exist: https://freematics.com/store/index.php?route=product/product...

So now you need to add a level shifer increase the number of mistakes and the risk of ruining your board. Your solution makes life of hobbyists less enjoyable IMHO. The GPIO are not level shifted in the board you link.

Why would you need to add a level shifter. Almost every single i2c or SPI component I've used works just fine with the ESPs 3.3v or is 3.3v to 5v compatible.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#113

Post by Dalewyn »

Yoofie wrote: post #71

I found it strange that they are using a ARM Renesas chip instead of your more well known brands such as ST Micro, NXP or Microchip. Renesas was fairly late on using ARM cores compared to the rest of the industry. Then I read the comment on CNX-Software. Renesas has invested 10 million dollar to Arduino. [1]. Now it makes sense. Gotta follow the money. [1]: https://www.renesas.com/us/en/about/press-room/renesas-annou…

It's kind of telling that Renesas, which combined the semiconductor businesses of NEC, Hitachi, and Mitsubishi, isn't a "well known brand".

Ouch, that burn is bloody epic.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#114

Post by ahepp »

Avamander wrote: post #66
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 agai…

Unless I'm reading wrong, it looks like this new Uno will have a Cortex-M processor rather than an AVR

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#115

Post by tyingq »

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 WiFi Uno R4 also comes with an ESP32, in addition to the ARM processor :)

"The WiFi version comes with an Espressif S3 WiFi module"

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#116

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

wombat_trouble wrote: post #76
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…

Arduino never made sense as far as technical specs go. You could always buy more capable and compatible AVR microcontrollers for one tenth the price. In the past decade, the disparity has gotten more dramatic as 8-bit chips have gotten even cheaper and even more capable. Arduino owed its success solely to building a healthy maker ecosystem of folks who simply defaulted to it as a platform, published tutorials, and pr…

With the massive difference in abilities and price between ESP32 based boards and Arduino, and the increasing number of shields available for common ESP32 boards, I think Arduino has lost a lot of the "community" advantage.

It's a shame there isn't a "standard" ESP32 board though. Some of the common boards/kits even have multiple revisions that aren't pin-compatible :(

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#117

Post by numpad0 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #113
Yoofie wrote: post #71

I found it strange that they are using a ARM Renesas chip instead of your more well known brands such as ST Micro, NXP or Microchip. Renesas was fairly late on using ARM cores compared to the rest of the industry. Then I read the comment on CNX-Software. Renesas has invested 10 million dollar to Arduino. [1]. Now it makes sense. Gotta follow the money. [1]: https://www.renesas.com/us/en/about/press-room/renesas-annou…

It's kind of telling that Renesas, which combined the semiconductor businesses of NEC, Hitachi, and Mitsubishi, isn't a "well known brand". Ouch, that burn is bloody epic.

It’s their ARM chip that isn’t well known. The company itself is, kind of. Think of a Sukhoi civilian jet next to a line of fighter jets carrying both Su and MiG prefixes.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#118

Post by rolenthedeep »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #95
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ESP is compatible with the Arduino IDE. I've found it as easy to program as any other microcontroller. (Though I have encountered watchdog issues with unoptimized code)

As long as you stay within the guide rails and libraries provided by the IDE. The average user cannot debug the RTOS running on an ESP, a single Cortex-M4 is more complex than an AVR but still understandable down to bare metal by your average enthusiast.

I'm in the middle of porting a project from arduino to esp-idf. If you want to do anything slightly complex with the Bluetooth stack, those features just don't exist in the arduino core. It's very frustrating.

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#119

Post by unmole »

wombat_trouble wrote: post #76
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…

Arduino never made sense as far as technical specs go. You could always buy more capable and compatible AVR microcontrollers for one tenth the price. In the past decade, the disparity has gotten more dramatic as 8-bit chips have gotten even cheaper and even more capable. Arduino owed its success solely to building a healthy maker ecosystem of folks who simply defaulted to it as a platform, published tutorials, and pr…

> You could always buy more capable and compatible AVR microcontrollers for one tenth the price.

Were you able to program them without additional (expensive) hardware?

Re: Arduino Uno R4

#120

Post by inamberclad »

wombat_trouble wrote: post #76
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…

Arduino never made sense as far as technical specs go. You could always buy more capable and compatible AVR microcontrollers for one tenth the price. In the past decade, the disparity has gotten more dramatic as 8-bit chips have gotten even cheaper and even more capable. Arduino owed its success solely to building a healthy maker ecosystem of folks who simply defaulted to it as a platform, published tutorials, and pr…

Arduino is also orders of magnitude lower friction than just about any other embedded platform. Baremetal AVR? Set up your makefile, ICSP programmer, and find the right fuse flags or risk bricking your chip with the wrong clock settings. STM32? Set up the whole STM32CubeMx project and export it as a Makefile and remember to only add code in the correct areas? Baremetal ESP32/ESP8266? Doesn't exist, but you can use a FreeRTOS fork with special binary blobs. PIC microcontrollers? Set up Microchip's HUGE IDE and special compilers and programming tools.

A board supported by Arduino is vastly easier to use, especially for someone who just wants their project to _work_, not to learn the deep arcana of baremetal systems.

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