91–100 of 247 posts
Cool. Now i can buy the cheap offbrand clones from Aliexpress without thinking i should have supported the actual creators.
Any recommendations?
Here in Brazil, people go for the cheap aliexpress clones to the point where some of our own manufacturers are closing shop. In these cases, strengthening the local ecosystem might be interesting and wiser in the long run.
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>A USB nerf gun that shoots at the developer who broke the Jenkins build Anywhere I can read any more about this?
I think it was on HN some time ago: https://github.com/codedance/Retaliation
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Sure they are. I mean, sure, you and I know the difference between an 8-bit micro with some friendly libraries and a 64-bit ARM SOC running a full OS. But for a lot of stuff they accomplish the exact same thing. So why not compare them by what most people do with them rather than their raw technical specs.
The big difference here is power drain. With Arduino you can use the Atmel ATmega328 microcontroller, which can run for months on 2xAA batteries. https://www.openhomeautomation.net/arduino-battery/
Real makers tend to buy unbranded stuff from Chinese free-shipping places anyway. Branded Arduino is mostly a historic artifact...
Serious question: what are people building with these boards? The recurring projects I've seen are controlling lights, doors/locks and monitoring water in plants. I don't find these particularly compelling, am I missing something? How is this the next big thing?
Arduino is "the next big thing" mainly because of the community that's sprung up around it: tons of libraries (of varying quality...), lots of cheap hardware and online resources make it easy to get started and continue past the beginner stage. Previous attempts (BASIC Stamp, etc) never made it to remotely this level of popularity.
e.g., I'm an experienced electrical/firmware engineer and I do Arduino prototype consulting on the side.
One of my recent projects was a downhole scanner for measuring well diameter. I also have a set of ongoing automation projects that are specific to a particular customer in the entertainment industry. Arduino turns out to be perfect for this kind of work.
This is the CRUD work of the Arduino world: basic automation that's not exciting or even difficult, but fills a real need.
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It's not "the next big thing", as much as it's a lot of little things. There's always been a gap between software and the physical world; the Arduino lets people easily bridge that gap. Though the typical projects are trivial as you suggest, the effect of being able to easily construct such projects is significant. That said, I think there are other MCs aside from the Arduino that are more interesting today, because…
"other MCs aside from the Arduino that are more interesting today" Can you give a few links? Thanks in advance.
This allows you to port real operating systems to it:
http://cowlark.com/2015-10-27-fuzix
It's also a really elegant architecture which is a pleasure to write assembly for, and it consumes absurdly small amounts of power.
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The ESP8266 [0] is, in my mind, one of the most interesting things in the microcontroller world right now. It's cheap, small, easy to use, and connects to WiFi. If you go into real computers, the C.H.I.P.[1] is quite an interesting device. It's $9, which is price competitive with the ATMega644 chip (in single quantities), has WiFi, Bluetooth, and runs Linux. It's also got lots of GPIO, like the Raspberry Pi, so it ca…
I'm linking to the SparkFun ESP8266 breakout [0] because I found this to be so much easier to get my bearings with than the raw chips/breakouts I'd gotten from Alibaba. Granted, I got my hands on them very early and they were still reverse engineering the documentation on them, but using this dev board has saved me many hours. It's also quite inexpensive for one or two if you're just trying to play around. [0] https:…
Why do you want an Arduino when the ESP8266 is half the price and has WIFI?
However, all the wifi magic on the chip is closed source, and the datasheets / documentation are much less complete than chips like the ATmega328 (which the Arduino Uno is based on). The ATmega328 has a 660-page datasheet, whereas the ESP8266 has a 30-page datasheet.
I really don't see the point of the arduinos when you can buy an esp8266 that is arduino compatible (you can use the arduino IDE and sketches). You can get the bare esp8266 chips for $1-$2 from aliexpress, or buy a tricked out one from adafruit (the huzzah) for $9. They have a full wifi stack, support micropython, etc. I think we're in a post-arduino age for microcontrollers. There are simply better options out there…
I'm a hardware novice, and I love Arduinos. I'd appreciate any info to help me learn, seems like I'm missing something. To me the ESP8266 is a superior alternative to Arduino wifi shields, not the Arduino itself.
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Sure they are. I mean, sure, you and I know the difference between an 8-bit micro with some friendly libraries and a 64-bit ARM SOC running a full OS. But for a lot of stuff they accomplish the exact same thing. So why not compare them by what most people do with them rather than their raw technical specs.
This is like saying a farm tractor and a pickup truck are the same thing because they both have internal combustion engines and wheels.