Teensy 3.1 bare metal: Writing a USB driver (2014)

Slightly off topic: I highly recommend this micro controller for projects big and small. It packs quite a punch in terms of ram/cpu per dollar, lots of pins, great community and Paul was really cool online and at maker’s faire. Thank you Paul, Robin, and the rest of the community for a great product!

Off-off topic, as a web developer I love their super functional site. It even has an about page with pictures of Paul windsurfing haha.

Re: Teensy 3.1 bare metal: Writing a USB driver (2014)

#6

Post by danellis » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 12:48 AM UTC

mattnewton wrote: post #5

Slightly off topic: I highly recommend this micro controller for projects big and small. It packs quite a punch in terms of ram/cpu per dollar, lots of pins, great community and Paul was really cool online and at maker’s faire. Thank you Paul, Robin, and the rest of the community for a great product! Off-off topic, as a web developer I love their super functional site. It even has an about page with pictures of Paul…

It doesn't seem terribly good value for money. You can get a Nucleo-32 or Nucleo-64 for $10-15. For $23 you can get a Nucleo-144.

Re: Teensy 3.1 bare metal: Writing a USB driver (2014)

#7

Post by AWildC182 » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 1:06 AM UTC

danellis wrote: post #6

mattnewton wrote: post #5

Slightly off topic: I highly recommend this micro controller for projects big and small. It packs quite a punch in terms of ram/cpu per dollar, lots of pins, great community and Paul was really cool online and at maker’s faire. Thank you Paul, Robin, and the rest of the community for a great product! Off-off topic, as a web developer I love their super functional site. It even has an about page with pictures of Paul…

It doesn't seem terribly good value for money. You can get a Nucleo-32 or Nucleo-64 for $10-15. For $23 you can get a Nucleo-144.

Dev board prices are basically random. Disregarding these parts in particular, microcontrollers are a good option because they keep the process of actually bringing something to market simple and cheap, especially for a hobbyist. To go beyond an STM32 or similar (Kinetis, ATSAM, etc.) to an MPU, you end up having to use BGA parts which means board prototyping/manufacture is harder, you have lots of extra PCB design work and you'll probably be putting yocto or some other linux flavor on it which sounds nice but can be a pain. A microcontroller is one part, usually with exposed pins that are easy to hand solder, that you can stick on a PCB with a voltage regulator and maybe a crystal and have a fully functional design. You don't need to worry about board feature sizes/tolerances, high frequency/controlled impedance traces, and the mess of support circuitry that a basic MPU will require.

I know people like to write them off because it's so easy to get devboards with 1GHz+ MPUs and gigabytes of memory/flash on them but if you want to sell stuff, eventually you need to package the design and if you don't NEED linux, you can make your life so much easier and in most cases, have a much smaller product with way lower power consumption.

Re: Teensy 3.1 bare metal: Writing a USB driver (2014)

#8

Post by jonah-archive » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 1:10 AM UTC

rwl4 wrote: post #3

Here’s a mirror for anyone interested: https://web.archive.org/web/20180824210333/http://kevincuzne...

Thanks for using us as a mirror! In case anyone who runs a CMS (HN admins?) is wondering, we would be happy for people to hit our Save Page Now functionality at the time of link submission, so a copy _as it was when posted_ is archived. This is good for both having a copy of the page in case traffic takes it offline (though in general, I think the link should go to the original since then people get their traffic), but also in case the endpoint changes their page or content after it's posted.

You can cause us to save a page by hitting https:// web.archive.org/save/your-url-here with a GET request, and there are more details about the ways to use the interface with browser plugins/etc here: https://blog.archive.org/2017/01/25/see-something-save-somet...

Re: Teensy 3.1 bare metal: Writing a USB driver (2014)

#9

Post by estebank » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 1:16 AM UTC

For anyone that might be interested, there were some efforts some time back to get Rust running on the Teensy[1][2][3][4], and although there have been no recent updates, the code is available to use and should still be relevant although there have been changes[5][6][7] in the meantime.

[1]: https://github.com/jamesmunns/teensy3-rs

[2]: https://branan.github.io/teensy/

[3]: https://disconnected.systems/blog/bare-metal-rust-on-the-tee...

[4]: https://github.com/SimonSapin/teensy-clock

[5]: https://rust-embedded.github.io/book/

[6]: https://josh.robsonchase.com/embedded-bootstrapping/

[7]: https://github.com/rust-embedded/wg/issues/40

Re: Teensy 3.1 bare metal: Writing a USB driver (2014)

#10

Post by mattnewton » Tue, Dec 04, 2018, 2:01 AM UTC

danellis wrote: post #6

mattnewton wrote: post #5

Slightly off topic: I highly recommend this micro controller for projects big and small. It packs quite a punch in terms of ram/cpu per dollar, lots of pins, great community and Paul was really cool online and at maker’s faire. Thank you Paul, Robin, and the rest of the community for a great product! Off-off topic, as a web developer I love their super functional site. It even has an about page with pictures of Paul…

It doesn't seem terribly good value for money. You can get a Nucleo-32 or Nucleo-64 for $10-15. For $23 you can get a Nucleo-144.

I guess I am comparing them more to arduino / adafruit replacements, rather than more direct manufacturer prices. I have no experience with Nucleo boards but many other boards I tried out just hadn’t no community or body of libraries to draw from, whereas the teensy is pretty popular in the makers community. In my case I happened to need to drive 1,000’s of LEDs in real-time for an art piece and not only is there good software support, there is even dedicated hardware made for the teensy for this in the Octo Ws2812 board. I was so impressed with the quality and the size that I generally just use a teensy LC even when a $3 trinket would probably work. YMMV