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Arduino announces its first ARM-based prototyping board, the Arduino Due

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Re: Arduino announces its first ARM-based prototyping board, the Arduino Due

#2
Hmm, I'm not sure whether an ARM board is really a good idea. For most applications, a normal Arduino is easily sufficient. For anything more complicated, you can buy an ARM board running Linux (e.g the upcoming Raspberry Pi [1] for $25-$35).

Arduinos are primarily used for education and prototyping. Programming raw ARM chips makes sense if you build a small series of specialized devices and want to keep costs down.

Given that the Arduino Due will certainly cost significantly more than $30, I see no market for such a board.

[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/

Re: Arduino announces its first ARM-based prototyping board, the Arduino Due

#5
Between Arduino and Raspberry Pi, are we approaching a point where a hardware startup can bootstrap? There's a lot of room for disruption in the home appliance sector that has been out of reach for the typical internet startup. Think garage door openers, doorbells, anything in your house that currently has a chip in it. Those companies are firmly entrenched in their way of doing business.

Re: Arduino announces its first ARM-based prototyping board, the Arduino Due

#6
post #4

Have they finally fixed the pin header defect in their boards or is it institutionalized at this point?

As far as I know, it's institutional, which is unfortunate. Since they didn't take the opportunity to fix it with the Arduino Uno I don't think they ever will.

Re: Arduino announces its first ARM-based prototyping board, the Arduino Due

#7

Between Arduino and Raspberry Pi, are we approaching a point where a hardware startup can bootstrap? There's a lot of room for disruption in the home appliance sector that has been out of reach for the typical internet startup. Think garage door openers, doorbells, anything in your house that currently has a chip in it. Those companies are firmly entrenched in their way of doing business.

I have been thinking the same thing for a while now.

I imagine they're great to create prototypes with and start up with, but as someone posted to my inquiry yesterday ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3011227 ), they're too expensive to go into production line.

Re: Arduino announces its first ARM-based prototyping board, the Arduino Due

#8
post #4

Have they finally fixed the pin header defect in their boards or is it institutionalized at this point?

Would you be kind enough to explain what the "pin header defect" is, for an Arduino noob? I'm just starting to play around with Arduino hacking and haven't heard of this yet (until now).

Re: Arduino announces its first ARM-based prototyping board, the Arduino Due

#9

Between Arduino and Raspberry Pi, are we approaching a point where a hardware startup can bootstrap? There's a lot of room for disruption in the home appliance sector that has been out of reach for the typical internet startup. Think garage door openers, doorbells, anything in your house that currently has a chip in it. Those companies are firmly entrenched in their way of doing business.

Building working prototypes is no longer a major problem. Nowadays, (experienced) individuals can design portable game consoles [1], alarm clocks [2], mobile phones [3], and pretty much everything else.

However, you need a lot of money, time and experience for manufacturing, testing, shipping, and supporting the final products. Unlike software startups, hw startups may need to apply for FCC and international certifications, supervise contract manufacturers, and need to think carefully about liability issues.

[1] http://openpandora.org/ - [2] http://www.chumby.com/ - [3] http://gta04.org/

Re: Arduino announces its first ARM-based prototyping board, the Arduino Due

#10
post #4

Have they finally fixed the pin header defect in their boards or is it institutionalized at this point?

Would you be kind enough to explain what the "pin header defect" is, for an Arduino noob? I'm just starting to play around with Arduino hacking and haven't heard of this yet (until now).

The distance between the two rows of pin headers on each side is not a multiple of 0.1". This means that every shield that you attach to the Arduino needs to have this same strange spacing between the rows of pin headers. You cannot just use a normal perfboard. As all Arduino shields have the same weird spacing, fixing this design flaw would require everyone to buy new shields. There are Arduino clones that add correctly aligned rows of pin headers [1], however.

[1] http://shop.pinguino.cc/image/cache/data/olimex/pic32-otg-50... (actually, no true Arduino clone)

Edit: found a good explanation with pictures here: http://brettbeauregard.com/blog/2009/07/arduino-offset-heade...

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