31–38 of 38 posts
It's great that Hernando is now Chief Design Architect, but how does that fit with the rest of the story? Did his opponent have to take him on as part of a settlement? Is this a win for the little guy?
And this is why I buy Chinese made clones of Arduino.
I don't even bother with Arduino clones. You can get much better for less money. E.g. in the UK on Amazon an Arduino Uno R3 is £39.99 and a clone with excellent reviews is £6.99. For £5 I can get an ESP8266 on a NodeMCU board - these have more GPIO, much faster CPU, WiFi, drop nicely in to a breadboard, etc. They work with the Arduino IDE with only a tiny bit of configuration. For not much more there's an ESP-32 whic…
Unfortunately, many Chinese manufacturers 'improved' the NodeMCU design. The so-called NodeMCU v3 boards are two wide to leave a free row of holes on both sides. (NodeMCU v3 is a bit of a misnomer, since the NodeMCU project never made such a revision).
I like the WeMos D1 Mini boards more [1]. They have fewer pins, but are narrow enough to leave a row of holes on both sides of the breadboards. Moreover, they have a nice collections of shields that you can stack on the D1 Mini [2] and/or a base doubler so that you can put shields side by side. My favorite is the protoboard shield that costs very little, and can be used to make your own shields [3].
The Wemos boards are priced in the same ballpark as the NodeMCU ($3.50 from Wemos/Lolin). Be sure to buy them directly from Wemos though or a reliable distributor from the west, there are a lot of fake Wemos boards with bad voltage regulators, etc.
Still hoping that they'll make a shield ecosystem for their ESP32 boards some day.
[1] https://wiki.wemos.cc/products:d1:d1_mini
[2] https://wiki.wemos.cc/doku.php#d1_mini_shields
[3] https://wiki.wemos.cc/products:d1_mini_shields:protoboard_sh...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't even bother with Arduino clones. You can get much better for less money. E.g. in the UK on Amazon an Arduino Uno R3 is £39.99 and a clone with excellent reviews is £6.99. For £5 I can get an ESP8266 on a NodeMCU board - these have more GPIO, much faster CPU, WiFi, drop nicely in to a breadboard, etc. They work with the Arduino IDE with only a tiny bit of configuration. For not much more there's an ESP-32 whic…
GP was probably thinking of something like the STM32-based blue pill or black pill, which can be had for ~$2 including shipping the US.
I have good experience with RobotDyn's Blue Pill boards. They have the correct pull-up resistor value and a micro-USB connector that is properly attached to the boards. They also sell them with the stm32duino bootloader pre-flashed, so that you directly use them with stm32duino (Arduino for STM32) without ST-Link:
https://robotdyn.com/catalog/development-boards/stm-boards-a...
[1] https://embeddedtronicsblog.wordpress.com/2018/12/29/fake-st...
Arm have finally started making a decent offline mBed IDE so hopefully in a year or two there will be no reason to use Arduino at all. The mBed API is much better and the range and price of boards is generally better too. E.g. ST Nucleo boards are around £10. Or the nRF52 device board is £30 - that gets you a proper BLE/Thread/etc board with a fully documented radio peripheral. You can write your own radio protocol i…
I don't get your point. Atmega328p arduino boards start at $2 or so ($4 for uno) and are currently at "apt-get install arduino" level of convenience that arm isn't getting anytime soon. Plus the whole point of microcontrollers is in working against specific chip, not universal API.
Moreover, you program STM32 boards (besides mBed, etc.) with Rust, which is also easily set up. The Rust embedded ecosystem is much smaller, but still nice for hobbyists. Moreover Rust with ARM cross-compilation is easy to set up.
Another nice feature is most ARM CPUs is that setting up and using gdb is trivial (e.g. with STM32s it's usually a matter of starting OpenOCD and then connecting to that with gdb).
Arm have finally started making a decent offline mBed IDE so hopefully in a year or two there will be no reason to use Arduino at all. The mBed API is much better and the range and price of boards is generally better too. E.g. ST Nucleo boards are around £10. Or the nRF52 device board is £30 - that gets you a proper BLE/Thread/etc board with a fully documented radio peripheral. You can write your own radio protocol i…
nRF52 is amazing, but IDEs are a trap. Sure, use one for your first project, then immediately move on to a proper Makefile. All professional development with microcontrollers is done with Makefiles, because of Reasons.
Ironically I do use the Arduino IDE with the esp8266 but I consider I will never fully know what those things are doing.