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Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

jaycarlson.net

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Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#141

Post by hathawsh »

jaydcarlson wrote: post #16
m_eiman wrote: post #2

Perhaps Jay should have hosted the page on a microcontroller instead of a database; archive copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20171106070102/https://jaycarlso...

With 21 of these parts on my desk, that would have been a good idea. Thanks for linking to a cached version — I'm working to get my little blog on Cloudflare to handle the traffic. I appreciate the kind words from everyone so far; it's been a huge learning opportunity, and I hope others can get inspired to grab one of these parts (especially one of the weirder ones) and do something cool with it.

I would pay for a book version of this work, or at least a PDF that I could print. It would be the kind of book that I could really get into. Fantastic work.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#142

Post by jo909 »

j_s wrote: post #105

What is the minimum horsepower to build a WiFi KVM? The monitor part seems toughest; if it's possible to do so cheaply I don't care how fast it updates. I plan on trying out this $12 ESP8266-based device which ships configured as a USB serial port -- I plan on using it as a serial console. It would be awesome if I could convince it to somehow act as a USB VGA-enough and see both the boot/BIOS screens and the OS GUI.…

USB mouse and keyboard is already possible on ESP8266: https://github.com/cnlohr/espusb

As for VGA i think you are out of luck, or need a faster/specialized co-processor. VGA requires 3 analog inputs of at least ~30MHz, and an ESP8266 has one analog input in the low (I think I've seen 20) kHz range, so more than 1000 times too slow.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#143

Post by lettergram »

alister wrote: post #11

If I hadn't seen this article on Hacker News today, is there any combination of plausible keywords I could have typed into Google to find this particular article if I were looking for an in-depth review of microcontrollers? I tried "best microcontrollers reviewed", "best low-cost microcontrollers", "survey of microcontrollers", and a bunch of others. Nothing that Google finds in the first 10-20 hits is as good this r…

This is actually part of the reason I built a project I call Piglet:

https://projectpiglet.com/

Google is really good for general information, but really bad for domain specific information. Piglet (in contrast) is really good at domain specific, but can be poor in the general case (although I haven't seen that yet).

For instance, this article appears right at the top of the search results: https://imgur.com/a/AkUTb

I recommend reaching out to me if you're interested - we are currently doing a private beta. Spcifically, the application is for investing (we are building an AI financial advisor), but I personally use it as a search engine as well.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#144

Post by lettergram »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #20
alister wrote: post #11

If I hadn't seen this article on Hacker News today, is there any combination of plausible keywords I could have typed into Google to find this particular article if I were looking for an in-depth review of microcontrollers? I tried "best microcontrollers reviewed", "best low-cost microcontrollers", "survey of microcontrollers", and a bunch of others. Nothing that Google finds in the first 10-20 hits is as good this r…

> I suppose the lessons are: there's room for lots of improvement in search engines, or SEO really works and you better promote yourself no matter how good you are, or word of mouth (Hacker News in this case) is still the way to find the best stuff. The way I look at it: SEO really works, and shit sources tend to spend a lot on it, while quality sources tend to not spend anything on it at all - therefore a lot of qua…

I posted this in another comment, but this is exactly why I built a project I call Piglet:

https://projectpiglet.com/

Google is really good for general information, but really bad for domain specific information. Piglet (in contrast) is really good at domain specific, but can be poor in the general case (although I haven't seen that yet). We track discussions around the articles, as opposed to linked pages. This typically provides more information. You can read about it on our about page.

For instance, this article appears right at the top of the search results: https://imgur.com/a/AkUTb

I recommend reaching out to me if you're interested - we are currently doing a private beta. Spcifically, the application is for investing (we are building an AI financial advisor), but I personally use it as a search engine as well.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#145

Post by LeifCarrotson »

Hasz wrote: post #126
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #28

> And even if it were properly executed, I think I reject the underlying goal of this strategy. The whole purpose of using an Arduino UNO form-factor is to support Arduino shields — yet I have never seen an Arduino shield on the desk of a professional engineer or advanced hobbyist. At least, not one plugged into one of these “Uno form-factor” dev boards. I have to chime in. What's the point of using the UNO form fact…

The code. The shields are pretty worthless, but the availability of libraries and example code is excellent. Instead of working out all the fine details of I2C, I can call a well developed function that takes care of all that for me. Instead of spending days writing a graphics library, I can find an off the shelf GFX library that has more features/is faster/ etc The ability to move quickly with well documented, prebu…

The problem is that there are a lot of Arduino form-factor mainboards from other manufacturers (like the one in the article) which have no code provided. But manufacturers cargo-cult into the form factor without realizing that code is the important thing.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#146

Post by Stratoscope »

gh02t wrote: post #115
abetusk wrote: post #55

The most relevant part for me is this cherry picked line from the article: ... Consequently, the megaAVR remains the most open-source 8-bit microcontroller on the market — by a long shot. ... Even though the Atmel AVRs aren't the fastest, or cheapest (in cost per unit) or the toolchain isn't the easiest to use or the debugging capabilities aren't as good, the fact that it's open-source makes it win, hands down. There…

It's important to note the rest of that portion though. But even as popular as Atmel is among hobbyists, Atmel has largely stayed out of this space directly. Instead, they’ve secured small-volume AVR sales by relying on the open- source community to build their own tools for themselves: turning out a slew of hardware and software used to program the megaAVR devices. While I applaud the efforts of these developers, th…

Mobile-friendly copy of the parent's quote:

> Consequently, the megaAVR remains the most open-source 8-bit microcontroller on the market — by a long shot.

and your quote:

> But even as popular as Atmel is among hobbyists, Atmel has largely stayed out of this space directly. Instead, they’ve secured small-volume AVR sales by relying on the open-source community to build their own tools for themselves: turning out a slew of hardware and software used to program the megaAVR devices.

> While I applaud the efforts of these developers, these tools are inferior to Atmel’s. Their programming speeds are terrible, they don’t support the new tinyAVR 1-Series devices, and they have absolutely no debug capability.

Don't use leading spaces to quote text, that's for unformatted text. Do this instead:

  > *Text.*

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#147

Post by LeifCarrotson »

hahamrfunnyguy wrote: post #51

If I am sourcing a part, I usually start with an objective comparison search on a distributors web site ( https://www.mouser.com/search/Refine.aspx?N=17176544&Ns=Pric... ). There's even lots of sub-dollar MCUs out there too. As the author notes, picking the best one depends a lot on what you need to do.

There's a lot that's not covered in a parametric search listing. In your link, picking a core doesn't tell you how good the peripherals are. (Digikey's parametric search [1] does give you a lot more information about what peripherals are available where Mouser doesn't even mention it). Clock frequency doesn't tell you how many cycles the instructions take. And none of that tells me anything about power consumption or performance in a typical application, or especially about the usability of the toolchains.

If answering "it depends on what you need to do" requires a lot of domain expertise to evaluate, there's definitely a place for summaries like this!

[1]: https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/...

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#148

Post by Jach »

jventura wrote: post #120

Maybe is not the best topic to ask, but does anyone know good sources (websites, books, kits) for playing with and learning a bit more about microcontrollers and electronics? I would prefer structured sources (those that take newbies by hand) than unstructured ones.. I used to play a little bit with the nerdkits ( http://www.nerdkits.com ) and really enjoyed their approach but they seem to have gone out of business a…

I think there's a lot of fun to be had with electronics when you don't use a microcontroller. Breadboarding, analog components, maybe some digital logic circuitry... And if you use a microcontroller, either not putting a linux distro on it or getting one that is incapable of running linux... For finding structured sources, you can do pretty well by just picking a college, finding their computer engineering program, some classes that look interesting, and see what books they require then buy them or see if a library has them. https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Fundamentals-10th-Thomas-Floy... or https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Electronics-Practical-Approac... are fairly good for instance but there are many others and some more appropriate for whatever your real study goals are.

It's really important to have a specific goal in mind regardless of whether you prefer to learn how to solve it with structured or unstructured materials, and to have an initial idea of what level of detail you want to go in order to accomplish the goal. The lower level you want to learn the less up-to-date your resources have to be, our understanding of electricity hasn't fundamentally changed since Maxwell's equations. :) Something like "I want to turn on a smart light of this type when there is motion in this area, and turn it off after 5 minutes" is a nice goal. And you can accomplish it at many different levels of hackery, and learn very deeply if you want about each component of your solution (for instance there's the entire field of RF if you want to know how the antenna works).

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#149

Post by LeifCarrotson »

dragontamer wrote: post #86
0xbear wrote: post #21

What's really amazing is that for less than $5 nowadays you can have a 1GHz+ quad core ARM Cortex-a53 with FPU and NEON support. I mean, sure, your entire device will be more than $5, and it'll be kinda power hungry at 3W or so running full tilt, but that's a pretty beefy chip for the price of a venti Starbucks latte, capable of running full Linux, with GPU, media encode/decode, etc, etc.

> $5 nowadays you can have a 1GHz+ quad core ARM Cortex-a53 with FPU and NEON support. And probably no realtime clock, or well-documented ADC / DAC. Sometimes, all you gotta do is: 1. Measure a voltage from something (external temperature sensor: such as a Thermistor: a resistor whose resistance changes based on the temperature. Apply a constant current to a Thermistor, and you'll get voltage that varies with tempera…

> or well-documented ADC / DAC.

Oh, they're well-documented alright, over these 4000 pages of PDFs from our various portals and manuals and peripheral standards and ARM standards and SDK code and...probably a few other places. So thoroughly documented you could never finish reading it all before the chip is obsolete!

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#150

Post by 05 »

cjsuk wrote: post #6

That’s a rather good article. I will digest that today. I’m currently using Cypress’s PSoC line (4200M boards) for a couple of personal projects. The reconfigurable hardware and analogue parts actually kill a lot of external hardware. It’s pretty amazing and ridiculously cheap. Visual Studio is the IDE for this. https://uk.rs-online.com/mobile/p/processor-microcontroller-... Note: don’t just jump into these if you th…

£8 is not even close to 'ridiculously cheap', compared to, say, Cortex-M0 STM32 boards for $1.5 with free shipping https://www.ebay.com/itm/1PCS-STM32F030F4P6-ARM-CORTEX-M0-Co...
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