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My Arduino projects don't require the power of a 32-bit processor, but do run on batteries. How much more (... or less maybe?) power is drawn by this processor?

It's reasonably close. If you check the datasheets for "Static Characteristics" / "DC Characteristics" you'll find:

The LPC1114FN28 (the ARM chip) draws 9ma @50 MHz, 6ua @deep-sleep, and 220na @power-down;
The ATMEGA168PA (typical Arduino-ish AVR) draws 4.2ma @8MHz, 0.8ua @power-save, and 0.1ua @power-down.

These numbers are just for the chips - the Arduino draws considerably more (about 40ma @idle), and you can stretch your batteries a lot by hacking it. To give a sense of scale, the power LED on an Arduino probably draws 5-10 ma just by itself.

Note that this is a "Cortex M0" profile ARM chip - M means Microcontroller, and 0 means low-end. This is a 50 MHz chip with 32K of flash and 4K of RAM. It's more powerful than an AVR, but don't expect to boot Linux on your breadboard with this thing... that's a job for the Cortex A (Application) series.

Source:
http://www.nxp.com/documents/d...
http://www.atmel.com/images/At...

Not necessarily. The device could easily be loaded with a unique certificate in manufacturing. A quick search shows that Atmel makes parts that would help enable this. I'm sure there are others. I expect the cost of this to continue dropping.

I wouldn't use RSA and I don't need SHA (though your assertion that SHA is difficult to fit in a uC is absurd). And like I said I don't need or want HTTP in my light sockets.

Having said that there are fucktons of uC that implement AES in hardware, particularly ones that integrate 802.15.4 PHYs which is exactly the sort of thing you would use in a wireless light or telethermometer.

For example, ok so 9x9mm is not exactly tiny, but there aren't many uCs smaller than that implementing radio PHYs. It has hardware AES, an 802.15.4 PHY, 128kb of program flash and 16kb of ram, plenty enough to implement an Edwards curve ECC scheme like Ed25519, or even RSA if you wanted to. I don't know why you would use RSA when it is slower, less secure and requires more memory than Elliptic curve crypto. It's also important to remember that you only need to compute a digital signature once for each association of the mote with the aggregator. Once you have agreed on an AES key for the association, you only need to use the hardware's AES instructions and compute a UMAC digest (fast) for each message. I would definitely use UDP. TCP is complex and not robust even when implemented correctly.

but you won't even have the flash and RAM space to properly fit a SHA or RSA algorithm in the smaller ones.

Oh really?

Recently a lot of authors studied the efficiency of elliptic curve cryptosystems on microcontrollers which are used in wireless sensor motes. They focus on the TI MSP430 and the ATmega128 developed by Atmel. Gura et al. first reported the efficiency of elliptic curve cryptosystems defined over prime fields on the ATmega128 in [16]. They used curves published in the recommendations of SEC[8]. The execution time of one ECDSA signature generation is 810 ms at 8MHz. Work by Uhsadel and Scott [22,26] further improves speed results on the ATmega128.

In this paper we will study the efficiency of optimal extension fields, prime fields as well as binary fields for the ATmega128. We will show, that the run times for a multiplication in GF(2^167) takes less than 1ms, if the memory accesses are decreased as much as possible. Furthermore we will take side channel attacks into account and measure the run times of elliptic curve scalar multiplication resistant to simple side channel attacks for several finite fields of different characteristic. It turns out, that binary fields are the optimal choice for elliptic curve cryptography if the Montgomery-Ladder can be used.

captcha: provoked

It's an ATTiny ($1.08 in quantities of 1) with V-USB (software only USB), most likely.

You could easily drive a strip, with animations and all, using a a cheap shift register or a dedicated led array driver.

Had no idea that it was possible to build a device that interfaces to USB in so few components (it does USB in software on a tiny microcontroller, and the firmware is around 1kb in size...)

That's the genius of USB really. Most early USB devices probably had a Serial Interface engine in hardware and a few hundred bytes of firmware written in assembler in flash or masked prom.

This device is actually quite high end

http://www.atmel.com/devices/attiny85.aspx

http://www.atmel.com/Images/Atmel-2586-AVR-8-bit-Microcontroller-ATtiny25-ATtiny45-ATtiny85_Datasheet.pdf

You've got 8KB of flash. You can program it in C and you get a USB driver.

http://www.blinkstick.com/help/firmware

Looking at the firmware main.cpp it implements HID class device. Writing to reportId 1 means you set the 3 PWM oscillators for red, green and blue leds. The other reportIds seem to read and write the EEPROM.

Had no idea that it was possible to build a device that interfaces to USB in so few components (it does USB in software on a tiny microcontroller, and the firmware is around 1kb in size...)

That's the genius of USB really. Most early USB devices probably had a Serial Interface engine in hardware and a few hundred bytes of firmware written in assembler in flash or masked prom.

This device is actually quite high end

http://www.atmel.com/devices/attiny85.aspx

http://www.atmel.com/Images/Atmel-2586-AVR-8-bit-Microcontroller-ATtiny25-ATtiny45-ATtiny85_Datasheet.pdf

You've got 8KB of flash. You can program it in C and you get a USB driver.

http://www.blinkstick.com/help/firmware

Looking at the firmware main.cpp it implements HID class device. Writing to reportId 1 means you set the 3 PWM oscillators for red, green and blue leds. The other reportIds seem to read and write the EEPROM.

an Arduino plus an Ethernet shield (around $60).

You can get it for a lot less than $60 of you don't buy official Arduino hardware.

eg. A $6 Arduino clone: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=arduino+pro+mini plus a $12 W5100 module: http://www.ebay.com/itm/111025516885

(or use a $4 Ethernet module if you don't need the official Arduino Ethernet library: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=arduino+ENC28J60 )

if you can overcome the IO problem

You can build an Arduino USB I/O controller for about $1.25 with a Tiny85 plus a copy of v-usb

but the thing is, quite easily these solutions start costing more than a raspberry pi costs

You can make one of those with an Tiny85 and a copy of v-usb.

Total cost: $1.25 for the chip plus some perfboard and wire.

If you need more I/O pins, step up to a Tiny84 or even a Mega328 (if you can afford a $3 chip!)

http://www.atmel.com/Images/doc11057s.pdf

16ch 12bit ADC (which, like on the old ones, is really a multiplexer on a single ADC).

2ch 16b DAC

9 32b timers
+1 32b timer for real time clock (presumably has 32768 crystal input, divided down, and runs at one second realtime)

Also has a bunch of UART/I2C/SPI channels, CAN, USB host/device, high speed SD card interface, ethernet MAC, ext. bus (for flash, etc).

etc

I'm sorry, did you just compare a 32bit SoC with an 2 dollar 8bit MCU?
Maybe do a better comparison? http://www.atmel.com/devices/AT32UC3A0256.aspx (And even then...)

Except when your device is already made with Arduino, and then it needs to do something new that is DSP. Then you need DSP with Arduino. Even if it's "stupid" it might be necessary. Most application development must use the HW already present in its installed base, or die trying.

Since DSP (or rather NSP, since "Native Signal Processing" is what non-DSP CPUs were needed to do when there was no DSP but only a CPU in the installed base) isn't impossible on microcontrollers, just somewhat impractical on many of them. Yet the AVR ATMega is common in Arduino, and includes a HW multiplier that can be used for multiply-accumulate that is the core of DSP:

The component that makes a dedicated digital signal processor (DSP) specially suit-
able for signal processing is the Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) unit. This unit is
functionally equivalent to a multiplier directly connected to an Arithmetic Logic Unit
(ALU). The megaAVR microcontrollers are designed to give the AVR family the ability
to effectively perform the same multiply-accumulate operation. This application note
will therefore include examples of implementing the MAC operation.

Meanwhile, new Arduino Due boards include ARM processors with HW multipliers.

Even if the processor/microcontroller has no HW MAC, it can do DSP - just less efficiently. If its application needs DSP, it can do it.

Unless the developer just insists it's stupid. Then the Arduino cannot do it. But not because of the chip.

Forget the EEPROM. The concept of programming a ROM seperately from a chip is so 1970's.

Get a programmer that programs chips with on-chip flash.

I'm biased in favor of Atmel's AVR architecture. http://www.avrbeginners.net/ http://www.avrfreaks.net./

You need to decide: will you go with dated (but doable) through-hole technology, or will you go surface mount (SMT) which is more modern, but more difficult to solder. That will impact what kind of programmer you need. Atmel AVRs can be programmed in-curcuit with a cheap dongle.

I don't always design in-circuit programming, debugging, and emulation into my circuits, so I keep a few of Atmel's AVR boards around. The STK500 is awesome: http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?tool_id=2735

$82.16 at Digikey: http://search.digikey.com/us/en/cat/programmers-development-systems/general-embedded-dev-boards-and-kits-mcu-dsp-fpga-cpld/2621773?k=stk500

You can get samples of the AVR Microcontrollers from Atmel's distributors, or they are available at many resellers, including DigiKey. Search for "atmega" and limt yourself to DIP packages.

I didn't start out with an Arduino, but instead got an evaluation kit for an ARM microcontroller from Atmel: SAM7S-EK. It connects to your computer through USB, it's possible to compile a program for it using gcc/binutils and upload it to the microcontroller using OpenOCD. The evaluation board has some built-in LEDs and buttons to play around with. As a fun starting project you can turn it into a HID-compliant USB keyboard or something.

Interesting that such extremely tiny microcontrollers are still being made. I'd have expected things to start at something like the ATtiny85 (just googled at http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/product_card.asp?part_id=3612). Still small at 8 kByte Flash and 0.5 kByte RAM, but it gives you a bit more to work with. The price difference is size and money is small. 8 pins vs. 6, and the first online store where I found it charges $2.40.

Unless you are planning some mass produced, really cheap product that needs a microcontroller, I'd say optimizing your code to fit in the ATtiny4 comes under "premature optimization".

Which does not mean I disagree with pride in 'doing it right', but in most cases finishing the product might be more important than squeezing another dollar out of the production costs.

Your phone has 200MB of memory, so when a stupid app uses all 200MB ... then what? You don't run your other apps? Being wasteful is stupid regardless of where you do it, in your home, or in your code.

(computers did have double digit RAM at some point, right? My history of computer hardware isn't that great)

http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/product_card.asp?part_id=4605&category_id=163&family_id=607&subfamily_id=791

If you're too lazy to follow the link:

The high-performance, low-power Atmel 8-bit AVR RISC-based microcontroller combines 512B ISP flash memory, 32B SRAM

That '32B SRAM' is actually shared with the 16 general purpose registers, so if you take those out, you have 16 bytes of ram. With those 16 bytes and the rest of the IO and other functions built in you can easily control 3 servos from a single input line, which takes feed from a larger motor. That chip is capable of driving stepper motors with interpolation for a CNC machine, again taking position information from somewhere else, not processing the command tree itself. The chip is used to handle input from several glass breakage detectors and performing false positive checks to avoid triggering because the cat knocked something off that didn't actually break an external window.

In short, the modern world is built on devices with tiny ass amounts of ram. Do you wear a digital watch? They're getting rarer now days, but thats another example.

Its not history were that stuff mattered, its right now today, you just aren't aware of it. Nothing about the concepts used then is bad today, they STILL provide massive benefits if you know them and follow them. You're basically saying 'gasoline is cheap, just burn more to get more done' and ignoring the fact that there are clear physical limits to computing, a given amount of mass, regardless of how its configured, can only store so much data and performing so many computations. Eventually you'll have devices which simply can't meet the demand being put on them ... because people thought ram/processing power was cheap and we no longer need to worry about those old guys.

Locality of reference, cache hits, pipeline stalls ... all these things that you know nothing about, yet drastically affect how your shitty little app runs. Sigh, I swear at some point in the past people actually took pride in 'doing it right'.

There may be weird command paths that produce unique delays and unless you tested all possible combinations of commands so you can emulate everything, you can't be sure there isn't something left.

That would be indeed a somewhat worthy challenge; though the hacker would just run the tool for a day or two and collect all feasible code paths and delays associated with them. That alone wouldn't be a big deal to spoof.

However in practice a dependency on those "unique delays" is impossible. The average life of an IC on the market is anywhere from 6 months to 1 year. This applies to everything, from external USB Flash (storage and the controller) to internal (parallel or serial) Flash to, as matter of fact, anything else. Nobody is willing to produce obsolete devices, and there is no need to either - they do a decent production run, pay some big bucks for that, and sell the parts until they are all gone. Then a new part is sent to manufacturing.

Replacement ICs, even though they are [sometimes] functionally identical, will have any number of differences in those "unique delays." So if you originally used some TSQ1234ZS and it's now obsolete, you solder a new TSQ1235ZSG and it's all of a sudden incompatible. This makes an OEM's life very interesting, to put it mildly, even if you just use the part per the datasheet. But if you went insane and decided to bet everything on undocumented features ... did I mention "insane" already? :-)

And as a side note, typical delays in ICs are pretty small, they are measured in nanoseconds usually. The Flash erase or write cycle is longer, but you can't write just to authenticate. Reading from Flash is pretty fast, around 50 ns if not faster. You need a very accurate clock to measure possible differences between accessing of certain addresses ... and that is possible only if an async device is used (one that tells you when it's done.) Synchronous devices do not tell you anything, they just return the data a bit faster than you are reading. In theory it's possible to probe individual addresses at different speeds and find the delay that is the threshold of data delivery. But that would require a complicated controller, with a DCM probably, or with a clock that is around 1 GHz.

It's far more practical to use instead a chip that is designed for auth/TPM use. That would be a secure (tamper-proof) microcontroller with a key that is programmed (once) and with some algorithms to generate whatever signatures or encryption you desire. That microcontroller would be in fact reviewed by a competent person to see if it leaks key material through its power pins or RF - and that won't happen with any Flash. And try to beat their 3-pin SOT23 size.

When you test for specific hardware behavior as a means of authentication, it's always a good idea to include speed measurements & checks in your code. That way, it's harder for the emulator to fake stuff.

Give me an eval board of a microcontroller with a USB device interface and a week of time, and you will get all of that and more. As matter of fact, I have an AVR32UC3A based board here that I built myself. I can plug it into a PC and it will do whatever the code in the MCU tells it to do, including emulating a mass storage class device with any defects you want. The attacker doesn't even need to order a board built, he can buy one off the shelf.

Cool. I've got an AVR32 (not ARM or MIPS, something completely different) powered board that I've played with a bit, similar idea I suppose. Although I don't believe there is an openbsd port for it... I should pick up something ARM sometime, here..

I've got a sort of hate for the gpio subsystem in linux, and I've never played with the one in openBSD - I'll have to look into that.

Luckily the board I have in mind has a full PC/104 bus (essentially ISA, with a different connector), so I can inb/outb to my heart's content. It's a via C3 thing, roughly the size of a 3.5" hdd.

I'd skip the gimmicky arduino stuff, and get:

Atmel STK500 link ($80 at digikey)
A handful of AVRs.. a bunch of small cheap ones (atmega48p, attiny45), a few of more expensive ones with a lot of pins (atmega16/164).

AVR-GCC (in repos for most debian based stuff, i'm sure you can get it for all the *nixen though)
WIN-AVR is the windows port link

all GPL.. groovy.

Under windows, STK500 will program with the free "AVR studio" from atmel,
under linux I find avrdude to be the best.

Guess this is all moot though, cause the OP wants to do RF stuff, not microcontrollers. :-)

Crap, good point. I did a quick read of the spec sheet when I posted, albeit too quick... http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/8271S.pdf

Seems that they did in software what should have been done in the hardware. The USB hardware should consider itself safe and the host machine suspect.. atleast in my mind. ATMEL has some good chips like: http://atmel.com/products/securerf/cryptocompanion.asp?family=646

I looked into microcontrollers like six or seven years ago and was pretty much scared away.

The Arduno's ecosystem has helped in that area. There was a previous generation of microcontrollers with hobbyist support, the PIC and the Basic Stamp. Those devices were getting rather dated; the Basic Stamp is descended from a 1970s National Semiconductor part. Moving to Atmel's ATmega128 was a step up, with 32-bit registers and a hardware multiplier. The industrial world made that step up a decade ago, but the hobbyist world was still struggling along with limited hardware. This is one of the reasons that entry-level hobbyist robots hadn't gotten much smarter for over a decade.

Although Atmel offered a complete set of free development tools for the ATmega line, they were never presented in a hobbyist-friendly format. Atmel has a huge range of products, and this is just one of many. It's not at all obvious what to order and download.

Also, SPARC is dying

Beg your pardon, sir, but do you care to offer a citation for that reference? Perhaps a Netcraft confirmation of some sort?

Didn't think so....

For the record, it's just a tad over your head.

And for the record, SPARC isn't out of the game just yet...

...according to their 1st quarter results from FY2010, things are looking up.

Hey, I never said I was a member of the C64 scene!

Just pointing it out. Recently I was looking up microcontrollers for a project, and was quite shocked to realize they've passed the imfamous C64! :P

I wonder if Atmel are C64 enthusiasts? They still list their S-RAM in K. And here I thought they were just being sloppy!

I got a kick out of reading his blog. Seems like a really neat project to learn how computers work at the lowest level.

I agree with you about the choice of microcontroller, though. Atmel AVRs are very popular, and are available in significantly more powerful varieties. Check out this one; it has 16KiB of S-RAM on the CPU, so you can save yourself the 2x8KiB chips he used, which means reduced cost.

Another one to consider is the Parallax Propeller. They aren't too popular, but have impressive capabilities, ignoring the price. It's basically an ultra-low-power 8-core microcontroller. The design is... fascinating. They created it with the same philosophy as older CPUs; rather than stamping big blocks together, every transistor was charted out by hand. (well, for the most part :P ) Apparently it has no interrupt handling, which introduces some different programming philosophies as well.

And failing that... a Cortex m3. That's a powerful one. Although it uses a standard un-interesting architecture, it's also quite fast. With enough RAM you could do SNES-level stuff quite easily.

I found this quote on the Atmel web site: "... the SAM7X offers 80 Mbps AES encryption throughput, which is 20x faster than a software implementation." I didn't know AES in specialized processor hardware was that advanced.

However, the other questions remain:

1) Does a lost password cause a complete loss of hardware? The article referenced by Slashdot implies that it does?

2) Would you trust a hidden encryption system? The U.S. government has established that it can act in secret, and put executives in prison if they don't cooperate. How would you establish that there is no hidden system to decrypt the data?

3) The specifications are poorly written. It would be scary to partner with such a disorganized organization. TrueCrypt is proven, and works very well.

4) Is a hardware implementation really more secure than TrueCrypt? TrueCrypt could, for example, overwrite memory 20 times before exiting. A shutdown command could overwrite all of system memory.

The Atmel AVR Butterfly is a $20 microcontroller on a board intended to be an introduction to AVR microcontrollers or microcontrollers in general. Low cost of entry, plenty of real world I/O (temp sensor, LCD, speaker, light sensor, ADC) and easy to program (free tool-chain, including gcc C compiler). Available from Digi-Key or Mouser online.

Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments from O'Reilly and Make-zine. Check out the author's associate website, HomeChemLab including their small but friendly and supportive forum.

Finally, for free, teach the lessons that freedom comes with the price of responsibility, and that knowledge and understanding are powerful (physics jokes aside) tools. Also honesty and integrity, include admitting to making mistakes and being unsure are valuable currency for building a reputation that can lead to being trusted (and respected). And that it is okay to be curiosity (though sometimes some tact is also needed). -- My parent's tolerance and patience were important factors in developing my good "geekiness" qualities, so I encourage an environment that is supportive not punitive about failure (mistakes).

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." - Albert Einstein

The Atmel AVR Butterfly is a $20 microcontroller on a board intended to be an introduction to AVR microcontrollers or microcontrollers in general. Low cost of entry, plenty of real world I/O (temp sensor, LCD, speaker, light sensor, ADC) and easy to program (free tool-chain, including gcc C compiler). Available from Digi-Key or Mouser online.

Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments from O'Reilly and Make-zine. Check out the author's associate website, HomeChemLab including their small but friendly and supportive forum.

Finally, for free, teach the lessons that freedom comes with the price of responsibility, and that knowledge and understanding are powerful (physics jokes aside) tools. Also honesty and integrity, include admitting to making mistakes and being unsure are valuable currency for building a reputation that can lead to being trusted (and respected). And that it is okay to be curiosity (though sometimes some tact is also needed). -- My parent's tolerance and patience were important factors in developing my good "geekiness" qualities, so I encourage an environment that is supportive not punitive about failure (mistakes).

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." - Albert Einstein

Another modern radiation hard processor would be the AT697

Getting Started in Electronics is starting to show its age, in so far as some of the parts used (UJTs) in the projects are not so easy to find, and neglects the large growth area of microcontrollers which can be cheaper than discontinued ICs.

Practical Electronics for Inventors suffers from a large number of errors, mostly typographical, but as a self-taught learning aid, this is frustrating.

My personal favorite beginning book for electronics suitable for adults is Guide to Understanding Electricity and Electronics by Randy Slone (ISBN 0071360573). Not without its own flaws, but contains a nice balance of theory and hands-on practical learning exercises that I feel comfortable recommending it. Another which I do not have a copy of myself, is Understanding Basic Electronics by ARRL. It may be somewhat geared towards RF topics, because it is published by the national USA amateur radio organization, but because they have most of the amateur radio topics covered in another textbook, it should be suitable for general electronics.

The next part is usage of discrete digital logic is now minimal being replaced by programming logic devices like PALs, FPGAs, or microcontrollers like Atmel's AVR and Microchip's PIC, to name only two of the most popular 8-bit microcontrollers available.

Jameco is maybe the most beginner friendly mail-order storefront. Their dead tree catalog is small enough you can find what you are looking for, even if you don't know everything about it. Their prices are reasonable, far cheaper than buying everything from Radio Shack, and you can easier expand to use Digikey, Mouser, Newark, and the hundreds of various surplus (typically new overstock / old stock, but not always) electronics websites. Octopart.com and FindChips.com help finding parts. There is another meta-search but I don't find as useful to amateurs.

Looking at hobbyist robotic, and amateur radio websites, as they have sub-interests within them that are oriented towards electronics. You may even find a local club in your area.

Magazines like Nuts'n'Volts, Servo, and CircuitCellar, Make magazine are good sources for hobbyist friendly resources.

No one kit, and no one book is enough to satisfy most people's self-taught education in electronics. Just as no one book will teach you everything to know about computers (TAOCP?)

Happy hacking!

Oh come on, arm7 and arm9(and xscale) are way different beasts. Same goes for comparing pics and basic stamps with arm7.
I personally prefer Atmel sam7 series over LPC as they have usb.
See http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/Product_card.asp?part_id=3524 for a good example.

Atmel's been doing the same thing with their wireless and low-power products. It's ridiculous how much time energy and money gets wasted for marketing.

*sigh*

messed up the link
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/general/advanced_search_results.asp?device=1&tools=1&faqs=1&datasheets=1&appNotes=1&userGuides=1&software=1&press=1&articles=1&flyers=1&checkAll=1&checkAllReference=1&target=butterfly>
/. need edit feature ASAP.

atmel AVR butterfly very cheap and fun to play with

http://www.atmel.com/dyn/general/advanced_search_results.asp?device=1&tools=1&faqs=1&datasheets=1&appNotes=1&userGuides=1&software=1&press=1&articles=1&flyers=1&checkAll=1&checkAllReference=1&target=butterfly/
atmel have more things also but butterfly is a good starter

Interesting board. I just picked up an AVR32 based SBC that may interest you also:
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?t ool_id=4102

Here is a dev kit for the same chip:
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?t ool_id=3918

It's not an x86 platform, but there is gcc support and it runs linux just fine out of the box.

Check out avrfreaks.net for a great community based on atmel's AVR offerings (from 8bit to 32 bit). What really draws developers in is how great the community is for these devices/chipsets. AVR is definitely a fan favorite.

Interesting board. I just picked up an AVR32 based SBC that may interest you also:
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?t ool_id=4102

Here is a dev kit for the same chip:
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?t ool_id=3918

It's not an x86 platform, but there is gcc support and it runs linux just fine out of the box.

Check out avrfreaks.net for a great community based on atmel's AVR offerings (from 8bit to 32 bit). What really draws developers in is how great the community is for these devices/chipsets. AVR is definitely a fan favorite.

"Computers have been slowly turing ... into overly-equipped money sinks ever since.."

You mean the price has gone up? Do you have any idea what computers used to cost in the 60's, 70's or 80's? or even in the 90's compared to today? The price trend is downwards. If you have been spending more it is because you can afford to spend more and simply want a more powerful machine.

If you want to really be impressed you should see what this little computer can do for less then $2. http://www.atmel.com/products/AVR/ It can't run Linux but it can be programmed with gcc and the GNU tool chain. The little chip is almost as powerfull as the VAX750 I used in the early 80's

http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?t ool_id=4102

click on the AVRfreaks wiki link for advice on exactly what to do to get started.

at 75 bucks, it is one of the cheapest kits you can get. If I am not mistaken you can download all the software for free.

Or find a embedded engineers PUG and talk to them. Someone might set you up with something they don't use anymore.

You talk about whining, I just had to try to help my daughter try to figure out why she didn't want to take the trash out.

You didn't provide links. That's no sin, but the searches I did that day didn't seem to produce the tools that run under Linux. I can't say why, because when I search now I see lots of stuff that appears to run under Linux.

But that day, I ended up at atmel's site, and the only thing I saw in about fifteen minutes of searching that site was stuff like

        http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?t ool_id=2725

I didn't even see a nod to free-as-in-freedom software. Sure, I could tell from other pages that they use GCC, but that doesn't mean anything. Lots of companies use GCC under MSWindows in ways that are compatible with the letter of the GPL but don't really give back to the community. Some even deliberately make it hard to move their stuff to Linux. I've been down those roads before, I don't have time to waste doing that any more.

Sometimes, being obscure is cool. Sometimes it gets in the way.

Every time someone asks Slashdot a question like this, the hysteria crowd comes out of the woodwork to scream about how it's absolutely impossible for an "amateur" to do it, and you absolutely must hire a "professional," lest something tragic happen, ranging from the ever-popular "you'll lose your job!" to a bucket of dead puppies or something.

Yes, I realize that professionals are sometimes necessary, especially in situations where life is clearly at stake (pilots, medical, law, etc.) I'm sure some jackass will show up to tell me how this is an industrial furnace and that clearly means that a professional is warranted, but we have no idea what the particulars of this situation are. Just stick to the freakin' question, people.

It used to be the case that "professional" implied not only a degree of competence, but also a certain amount of integrity and experience. But that's just not true any more. All it means now is that someone gets a paycheck for doing something. Often it means that they're experts in nothing more than doing something as cheaply as possible.

For what it's worth, I'm personally fond of the Atmel AVR microcontrollers. Many, many people are also fond of Microchip's offerings in the PIC line. But for rapid development, something like the Parallax BASIC Stamp is probably the way to go. They're cheap and easy (like a good woman) and let you focus on the task at hand rather than the bit-level details of how to read sensors, etc.

It seems all the sciences/engineering/tech fields got hit. Anything where lots of effort went into training.

I can understand the businessmen and their concerns about getting cheaper skilled labor. Its the same concern I have when I can get cheaper stuff.

My main concern is with Congress, and how they've been passing all this one-sided law.

Outsourcing labor, Fine! But what happens if I try to buy a CD which is cheaper in China than here? Can't do that! Its a Violation of some businesses' marketing model. Well whoop-de-do, we have a "marketing model" too! We paid in both time and dollars for our education, and we are paying a hefty income tax if we are making enough to keep a roof over our heads... and that "business model" needs protection too.

Of course, business can get labor somewhere else cheaper. Those people do not have to pay US property or income tax, or have the cost of living overhead we have here. I can get my music cheaper too if I don't have to pay all the RIAA overhead, but somehow skitting around paying the RIAA is considered illegal, but outsourcing skills is simply business. RIAA cannot compete with damned near free. Neither can I. We protect RIAA with DMCA. Either provide me housing, food, and creature comforts at foreign rates and relieve me from taxation - or protect me too, or my kind will cease to exist.

Personally, I am perplexed, as I have a lot of skills in refrigeration design, and its quite obvious to me how to design HVAC systems that take advantage of ice baths to store enthalpy so not only can I time-shift the energies required to transfer enthalpy (BTU's of heat energy) to times of abundant power in the middle of the night, I also take advantage of radiating the unwanted heat to deep-space much more efficiently than when I have a 6,000 degree kelvin heat source overhead during the day.

Not only that, I have a whole bag of evaporative cooler and other tricks in my bag to make SEER soar. There are a whole mess of tricks like using gravitic pressure assist to keep refrigerant from flashing before it hits the thermal expansion valve, or using pipe-in-pipe methods to recycle heat flows. These have to be custom-designed for the application for maximal efficiency.

There is a whole mess of new technology here to be explored. Brand new scroll and screw compressor designs coupled with SEMA motors and International Rectifier drivers, driven with custom programmed AVR micropower controllers. Yes, like Linux, it will take some time to set up, but once its running, and people understand how it works, it will work as long as you want it to. Efficiently. And if something better comes up - if you know how the thing works, its easy enough to integrate it in.

But what happens? The powers that be want an off the shelf box, just like in your field, they want a windows box. Anything so they don't have to understand what they have. Just use it.

We cannot thrive on ignorance!

From what I see, we are rapidly approaching "peak oil" and energy prices will soar. Trying to tell the executives about this is just as hard as selling them on a Linux system. They will pay whatever it takes to have the mainstream unit, no matter how virus prone or inefficient it is. A big company offers them the comfort of being held blameless for going that way, no matter what goes wrong. Its the little guys who stand to profit/lose personally which seem far more likely to adopt innovation than the corporate leviathans.

It seems a shame when I see so many technical people underemployed when I feel our country needs us more than ever. At least the kids can see us and avoid our mistake like the plague, and get their tra

If you want to start off with C, I recommend the AVR Butterfly.

You can get an AVR Butterfly http://www.atmel.com/products/AVR/butterfly/ for $20 at digikey... it comes with an LCD screen, a five way joystick-like button, a speaker, some sensors, RS232 level converters, and an ATMega processor. To program it, you just wire up an RS232 plug to the board and download the C/Assembly compiler from their web site. GNU tools for this are also available. No specialized programmer required.

The advantage of a board like this is it's quick. You don't need to wire up a micro with an oscillator and some output devices. You don't need a special programmer. You don't need to buy a C compiler. It's all there, and $20 is fairly cheap. If the kids like 'em, they can buy their own for home.

If you want to start off with something easier, like BASIC, the BASIC stamp seems like the way to go.

Good luck!

While Z80s are cool, some people prefer microcomputers with RAM, ROM and I/O integrated on the IC. For example:

Microchip or
Atmel

or a small board level device like:

The Basic Stamp

A very cool supplier of microcontrollers and accessories is:

Sparkfun

And the usual suppliers:

Digikey
Newark
Arrow
Mouser

According to the article, there are three companies that have actually worked with the free software community on drivers. Here is the list:

Ralink Technology

Atmel Corporation

Realtek Linux drivers here

Vote with your money, folks. If you would like to see companies cooperate with the free software community, reward the companies that do so by buying their products.

If you know of a particular piece of WiFi hardware that works particularly well in Linux or BSD, please follow up here so we all know what to buy. (See also this list.)

According to the article, there are three companies that have actually worked with the free software community on drivers. Here is the list:

Ralink Technology

Atmel Corporation

Realtek Linux drivers here

Vote with your money, folks. If you would like to see companies cooperate with the free software community, reward the companies that do so by buying their products.

If you know of a particular piece of WiFi hardware that works particularly well in Linux or BSD, please follow up here so we all know what to buy. (See also this list.)

steveha

Don't get me wrong, I love the AVR microcontrollers - but we're talking a few K of RAM, 8 to 128K of Flash for the program, a smattering of EEPROM and a top speed of 16MHz. I would be impressed if you could run the Linux kernel on that.

Most people are familiar with the 8-bit Atmel AVR microcontrollers, similar to the Microchip 8-bit PIC microcontollers. The AVR32 is a 32-bit microcontoller. I believe it was developed by Atmel to be a easy to mirgrate to target to compete with Freescale's 32-bit offerings, and various manufacturers' low cost 32-bit ARM processors.

Most people are familiar with the 8-bit Atmel AVR microcontrollers, similar to the Microchip 8-bit PIC microcontollers. The AVR32 is a 32-bit microcontoller. I believe it was developed by Atmel to be a easy to mirgrate to target to compete with Freescale's 32-bit offerings, and various manufacturers' low cost 32-bit ARM processors.

I've never heard of it... a quick peek on their website shows: For example, the AVR32 can execute quarter-VGA MPEG4 decoding at 30 frames per second (fps) running at just 100 MHz while comparable architectures require 260 MHz and more to decode the same movie stream.Sounds sweet... how do I get one? Free samples?