121–130 of 136 posts
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Addressing specific markets only works if you do it uniquely or better. The simplified Arduino tooling works on the ESP32, which is also the cheaper and better option.
Good point. Are there ready made ESP32 boards good for education?
They aren’t cheap but they also provide support and a good to deal with. https://www.dfrobot.com/
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…
But an ESP32 can't turn on an 2N7000 MOSFET. 2N7000 is a 5V MOSFET, and is the cheapest one to boot, and one of the easiest to use.
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…
One thing that was unique about the 8-bit Arduino was that while the board itself was common for prototyping, it wasn't that hard to put an AVR chip on a breadboard for permanent projects or just for the sake of doing it and there were plenty of tutorials. There was even built-in support in the IDE for using an Arduino board as a ISP programmer for a raw chip by connecting a few wires.
With the Raspberry Pi, hardly anyone who used it would ever build their own/modify the design of the board itself.
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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…
Is it actually possible to totally brick an AVR chip that way? Can't you always recover them with high-voltage programming mode?
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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?
You can also easily use an Arduino, a solderless breadboard, a few jumpers and some software as an AVR programmer [2].
[1] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9825
[2] https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Program-an-Attiny85-Fro...
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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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> find the right fuse flags or risk bricking your chip with the wrong clock settings Is it actually possible to totally brick an AVR chip that way? Can't you always recover them with high-voltage programming mode?
Either way, I'm saying that Arduino is _the_ microcontroller platform with the fewest gotchas for a beginner.
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There are bajillions of mosfets; you can certainly find another one that works even if it's a tiny bit more expensive.
Sure. So name one, that's cheap, readily available from many manufacturers, through hole, with 100mA+ or so Ids, low enough capacitance to be used with a microcontroller like ESP32. Most of the good MOSFETs I'm aware of are SMT only, which is not beginner friendly. 2N7000 through hole is extremely available damn near everywhere. All companies have a clone of the venerated, classic MOSFET. EDIT: Its also been used in…
Yes, you can be careful about this and order the right part number to get a newer protected-gate version, but at that point please do us all a favor and specify some non-stone-age part.
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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.
Yes, the processor required to run these network protocols is pretty beefy, so a big and fast chip like those made by Espressif has plenty of capacity to run your own app alongside the big communication stacks, but it's far simpler and more power efficient to let a small and simple Bluetooth chip do only Bluetooth stuff, and power it up or down as needed and talk to it over SPI or whatever from a host processor that you have full control of.