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Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

jaycarlson.net

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Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#161

Post by Bromskloss »

hexane360 wrote: post #140
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…

This is why I'm so excited to see Rust (with full core libs) running on AVR. https://github.com/avr-rust

That's great! I've been looking forward to Rust on microcontrollers. What's the current status? Is it fully functional so that you can use your usual Cargo and rustc? Are all AVRs supported?

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#162

Post by StavrosK »

jo909 wrote: post #93
lucaspiller wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah if anyone is just looking to get started tinkering with embedded hardware I'd say this is the way to go. The chips were made popular by NodeMCU which uses Lua, but you can easily run Arduino or write plain C on the same hardware. I've tried a few breakout boards and my favourite is the WEMOS D1 Mini. All you need to supply is a MicroUSB cable. You can get them shipped from China for under $3: https://wiki.wemos.…

Absolute favorite for me too. ESP32 is now also widely available and pretty cheap for it's performance. My second favorite ESP8266 hardware are the "Sonoff" brand WLAN mains power switches. I especially like the Sonoff S20 for its form factor, and the Sonoff POW for it's power metering capability. They contain an ESP8266 and can be reflashed with different firmware that does not need the vendors cloud services to wor…

Oooh, ITEAD make sockets now? I got a bunch of switches a while ago, wrote my own firmware for them, and today I saw their wifi-enabled light switch and got one of those too. I love love love their stuff, they make it super easy to retrofit my house with "smart" devices where I can control every line of code.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#163

Post by sithadmin »

derefr wrote: post #159
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is remarkable because there is typically very limited accessible blogs about topics like this. This long article requires in-depth knowledge of a large number of microcontrollers, and the time, desire, and ability to verify, collate, and summarize all that information. That's a rare combination. An ordinary journalist could not write this article. It would take hundreds or thousands of hours to gain the…

How about an (technical advisor to a) buyer for a company like Adafruit, that both resells SoC/microcontroller "developer boards", and puts out their own? I could see them writing up their experience in trying to find good SoCs to base their products on, and how they compare to the ones in the boards they resell.

Methinks most business owners/managers, especially MBA-types, would see that as giving away sensitive info/competitive advantage to competitors and nix the idea.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#164

Post by MekaiGS »

koancone wrote: post #82
drcongo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed some _very_ odd things going on with Google Search results recently. The other day I tried a search for an error message from SQLAlchemy, the results were poor so I added the word `SQLAlchemy` to the query and it removed _all_ answers about databases and returned a bunch of stuff about mineral mining.

Google is increasingly returning irrelevant results in the effort to deliver the targeted content their advertisers want. I predict a future for a subscription funded search engine that just delivers lexically relevant results without all the bullshit. I for one would gladly pay to use something better than Google. The advertising monetization model is broken.

Second your opinion, Google hasn't been crazy good at domain specific search for me lately.

Google video search is also weaker than a pure youtube search for me too, so much so that I only use youtube search nowadays which is perhaps their intent...

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#165

Post by _jsg6 »

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…

One quick thing you can get into is assembling electronics kits. Granted it's not programming, design, or theory, but it's an interesting alternative that'll get you started without having to catch up on theory. All you need is the kit and a few basic tools, like a soldering iron, some tweezers and pliers.

There's a person (fairly active on reddit, I believe) who put together a youtube channel reviewing such kits. Sadly he stopped posting new videos years ago (bored and moved on?) Think he's an EE or something comparable for work, but, in either case take a look at some of his offerings: https://www.youtube.com/user/SUBLOOP/videos

The video that I got started with and caught my attention was his "Active Speakers" kit, part 2. They're entertaining, his soldering is just hypnotic, and it covered some troubleshooting you'd run into with electronics.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#166

Post by BrandoElFollito »

zo1 wrote: post #151
ashark wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometime around the housing market crash (though unrelated, I assume) Google seemed to give up on fighting spam sites and just harshly down-ranked anything that's wasn't an ultra-high-traffic site. A little while later (2010? 2011?) their search got much "smarter" and it became difficult to impossible to trick it into giving you less-popular results using well-crafted searches. A big (and very good!) chunk of the web…

One other thing I've noticed, and it's been happening for a few years. Is that somehow, magically, there are websites out there that have the exact combination of my search results in their title. Almost as if Google forwarded my search to some party which then went ahead and created a dummy "proxy-search" site with the exact heading, and whose body just contains their own results for the same search criteria I used.

I was recently wondering about the same and was also wondering how this can happen.

Your proxy-search would be a solution but then I wonder what "indexing" would mean to Google

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#168

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

sime2009 wrote: post #85
lucaspiller wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah if anyone is just looking to get started tinkering with embedded hardware I'd say this is the way to go. The chips were made popular by NodeMCU which uses Lua, but you can easily run Arduino or write plain C on the same hardware. I've tried a few breakout boards and my favourite is the WEMOS D1 Mini. All you need to supply is a MicroUSB cable. You can get them shipped from China for under $3: https://wiki.wemos.…

MicroPython runs great on the ESP8266 too.

This. It's the cheapest option to start with MicroPython and it works perfectly.

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#169

Post by Treblemaker »

ksangeelee wrote: post #88
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…

It's been on my mind for a while that I could use a search engine that's seeded only with sites that contain little or no advertising or tracking. A starting point could even be the corpus of HN articles and comments, perhaps augmented with entries from the Common Crawl archives and traditional crawling. I tend to be interested in novel and creative work, and it seems to me that most of the sites I find most rewardin…

I've been thinking about this recently, too. This was just on the front page of HN yesterday:

"Does anyone remember websites?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631565

"Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost. In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding those gems, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well. But finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.

The wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet."

Re: Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

#170

Post by deeg »

jventura wrote: post #134
deeg wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

adafruit.com and sparkfun.com are two of my go-tos. Pretty strong community support.

Thanks for your input, I briefly checked those links and they seem to be stores and quite overwhelming in their range of products and tutorials. What I'm looking for is mostly project tutorials or books at a basic level, as in "how do I start?". For instance, the nerdkit had me build a temperature sensor from the most basic parts and display the temperature in a LCD (bundled with the kit). Any other suggestions? Edit…

Sorry, I should have been more specific. For AdaFruit, there are two (among many) options. A general "Learn" page (learn.adafruit.com) with all sorts of step-by-step projects using different microcontrollers. Most products pages will also have a list of projects and introductory pages (many with video). For example, the Raspberry Pi has this: www.adafruit.com/product/3055

Sparkfun has pretty much the same thing with a "learn" page (learn.sparkfun.com) and all sorts of tutorials. E.g. here's a list of tutorials/projects dealing with ATtiny variants, a microcontroller discussed in the original artical: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/tags/attiny

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