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Teensy 4.1 Development Board

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Re: Teensy 4.1 Development Board

#31

Post by simias »

Youden wrote: post #8

Genuinely curious, what kinds of projects are better suited to a Teensy than an Arduino, ESP32 or some form of Raspberry Pi? Is the main advantage the pin count?

I think the main selling point of Arduino is the "batteries included" approach if you're not familiar with embedded programing. Personally I never use Arduino because of the weird header spacing (I get it's sort of a trademark at this point but it's just annoying to work with).

If you don't care about premade environments then yeah, it's mainly about which pins and embedded peripheral the board supports. Pin count is not everything, nobody wants to bitbang USB or even high-speed SPI. For instance I see that this teensy board supports up to 18 analog inputs when Arduino supports between 6 and 15 according to this: https://www.arduino.cc/reference/en/language/functions/analo...

Basically the choice of controller should be the last step in your design: first thing about your inputs and outputs, then find a controller with suitable I/O and processing power (and preferably with standard header spacing).

RPi is more like a mini-computer than a controller, it's a lot more powerful and comes with massively more overhead. You program something like a teensy on "bare metal" with only a very minimal runtime. On an RPi you'd typically run a full blown OS. That opens up many possibilities but it's also generally more expensive and more power hungry. If you just want to drive 5 GPIOs it's completely overkill.

Re: Teensy 4.1 Development Board

#32

Post by neltnerb »

Youden wrote: post #8

Genuinely curious, what kinds of projects are better suited to a Teensy than an Arduino, ESP32 or some form of Raspberry Pi? Is the main advantage the pin count?

I've used both extensively as "daughterboards" to big control circuits. The main advantage of the Teensy to me is that the hardware is better than Arduino was at the time. It is also, well, Teensy compared to most Arduinos so it takes up less real estate.

Now that Arduino is running an ESP32 or ARM chip or has FPGA acceleration and such I'd say the difference is mostly just size. I do think some of the core libraries for the Teensy are better written though, the Arduino authors don't seem to focus as much as Paul does on optimizations. Paul also frequently posts in the forums to respond to questions, which is unusual in my experience.

Edit: In response to the Raspberry Pi, it's just a totally different beast. The Teensy is probably not well suited to run much of an OS (nor is the Arduino). Both are better suited to things that require more pins available; embedded controllers rather than computer substitutes.

Re: Teensy 4.1 Development Board

#35

Post by blackfawn »

sgillen wrote: post #26
rhmw2b wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used the Teensy 3.1 and it's more or less an Arduino (including uses the Arduino IDE) but lower cost and more powerful processor. There is also a way to build C/C++ code and run it on the Teensy. ESP is similar but has WiFi built in and Raspberry Pi is closer to a full blown general-purpose computer than an embedded platform. Software on the Teensy runs on bare metal, software on the Raspberry Pi usually runs on…

To be fair you can also build C/C++ code on an arduino. Although if you want to move away from the Arduino IDE/language, probably an Arduino is not the best platform for you anyway!

The standard Arduino "language" is really C/C++, is it not? (as well as all the C/C++ libraries that extend it) I suppose the "Arduino language" itself could be described as a library as well, or at least a C/C++ helper/wrapper abstraction for common tasks.

Re: Teensy 4.1 Development Board

#37

Post by linarism »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #33

What would it take to make CAN work with this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus

It is supported in hardware for multiple protocols: CAN1.0, CAN2.0, and CANFD. I'm pretty sure there are 3 ports that can be used simultaneously and independently. I only use 2 with CAN1.0.

Edit: By hardware support I mean that a CAN transciever connects to two GPIO pins with access to CAN chip hardware. No SPI interface needed.

Re: Teensy 4.1 Development Board

#38

Post by [deleted] »

btashton wrote: post #21
subhobroto wrote: post #10

With the supercheap sub $5 ESP32/STM32 boards (both have Arduino core support) and their equally cheap add onboards for camera, ethernet or USB OTG - who exactly are using the Teensy line today and why? I'm genuinely curious.

These are substantially more powerful than both of those families.

[deleted]

Re: Teensy 4.1 Development Board

#39

Post by detaro »

simias wrote: post #31
Youden wrote: post #8

Genuinely curious, what kinds of projects are better suited to a Teensy than an Arduino, ESP32 or some form of Raspberry Pi? Is the main advantage the pin count?

I think the main selling point of Arduino is the "batteries included" approach if you're not familiar with embedded programing. Personally I never use Arduino because of the weird header spacing (I get it's sort of a trademark at this point but it's just annoying to work with). If you don't care about premade environments then yeah, it's mainly about which pins and embedded peripheral the board supports. Pin count is…

Teensy has a great library ecosystem too, so it can be a serious contender regarding "batteries included"

Re: Teensy 4.1 Development Board

#40

Post by linarism »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #3

Generally a very nice addition to the lineup. I'm personally fascinated by the support for soldering on an additional RAM chip; depending on how painful it is to actually access that memory, the extra 8MB could finally be enough to run uclinux.

Apparently it's as simple as using a different offset in pointers when enabled!
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