51–60 of 191 posts
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.
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.
It is all a question of use case. This reply comes up all the time when I talk about how I use microcontrollers and what I use them for. For myself, microcontrollers offer me maximum control with minimum overhead. No OS, or maybe just some RTOS that does not really "boot" except for copying initial values for variables from Flash into RAM, being done in a fraction of a second. Switch it on, off it goes. Interfacing w…
But it still blows my mind that the equivalent (a vast superset, if you consider the GPU and specialized coprocessors) of my workstation from the late 90s now costs less than $5.
Now if somebody from China can make a list of the cheap micros under 1-2 RMB, now that would be a nice list for super low cost stuff.. that I'd be very interested in...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Indeed. SEO how it's referred to and done most of the time is almost an anti-pattern: People adjust their system (website) to implementation details of another service (search engines) instead of just fulfilling the "public contract" (exposing good, accessible content). But that's dangerous, as search engines evolve, change behavior and occasionally penalize this kind of behavior. That's why I always tried to explain…
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Consequently, the megaAVR remains the most open-source
8-bit microcontroller on the market — by a long shot.
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In addition, places like Adafruit [1] and Sparkfun [2] build their own boards and make most of their code free/libre/open-source [3] [4], with a large focus on Arduino.
It'll be interesting to see how the electronics market evolves when the current and subsequent generations are trained on AVRs.
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…
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've noticed recently (few years maybe) that Google "punishes" results from blogs and less known domains. Searching for some specific keyword combination often results in skipping first few pages of cruft from popular sites just to find exactly what I was looking for in some blog post buried >3 pages deep.
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…