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New Arduino Due Brings More Power To the Table
mikejuk writes "After six years in the making, the Arduino Due is finally becoming available and, with a price tag of $49, is bound to give a boost to the platform. The Due, which means 2 in Italian and is pronounced 'doo-eh', replaces the 8-bit, 16MHz Uno by a 32-bit, 84MHz processor board that also has a range of new features — more memory, a USB port that allows it to pretend to be a mouse or a keyboard say, 54 I/O pins and so on — but what lets you do more with it is its speed and power. The heart of the new Arduino Due is the Atmel SAM3X8E, an ARM Cortex-M3-based processor, which gives it a huge boost in ADC performance, opening up possibilities for designers. The theoretical sampling rate has gone from the 15 ksps (kilosamples per second) of the existing boards, the Arduino Uno, Leonardo, and Mega 2560, to a whopping 1,000 ksps. What this all means is that the Due can be used for much more sophisticated applications. It can even play back WAV files without any help. Look out for the Due in projects that once would have needed something more like a desktop machine."
The Pi isn't a microcontroller. Will you people stop equating them. They're tiny and they're boards but one is not the other.
As far as the LaunchPad. I'd love to try it out but they've so heavily tied to their Windows GUI that it makes it hard to work on anything else.
The nice thing about the Arduino is that I can quickly write a sketch to do analog and digital IO. Yes I know how to read spec sheets and setup all the registers to control the pins but the Arduino abstracts all that. I setup pin 13 to do output then just digitalWrite the pin high or low. Same with interrupts.
If all hammers were the same price, I'd pick the sledge hammer.
Not a paleontologist, then.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The point that everyone - manufacturers and users alike - seem to be missing is the toolchain.
The popularity of the original Arduino was entirely due to the free IDE released by Atmel for their chips. Since then many other companies have released micro boards hoping to hop on the bandwagon, mostly with little success.
Micro boards have been available since the 1980s. I've personally used 68HC11 single-board computers ($50 each) in that era for personal projects. They are programmed in assembler, because the C compiler can cost several thousands of dollars - upwards of $10,000 depending on vendor and capabilities.
Look through back-issues of Hackaday to see all the neat, new single-board computers which have been released - none of them rise to the popularity of the Arduino.
Open source enthusiasts may mention that you can use GCC, but that's a compiler not a toolchain. Open-source tools require an investment of learning and trial-and-error to get things working correctly, and most of the time it's a large investment that people don't want to make. The standard practice for open source is to find a tutorial, follow every step, and then google for answers when it doesn't work.
When the [whatever other board you happen to like] comes with a plug-and-play IDE that lets developers concentrate on the code instead of getting the code onto the board, then you'll have something.
The Arduino was never about price or performance. If you really want a led display, you can get fastly more powerfull and usuable device by simply buying a dedicated device. Same for a remote control robot, even programmable ones.
But with an Arduino even those NOT blessed with a background in electronics could make it work. There are even interfaces for it where you program it completely through a icon interface like this http://www.electronics-lab.com/blog/?p=5865
Yes, there are more powerful devices out there, there are cheapers devices there are even more powerful AND cheaper devices out there. And they ALL didn't succeed to even come close to the support Arduino had. Even if you have no programming experience and never messed around with a battery and a led, the Arduino community is able and willing to give you a hand.
It is the difference between Ubuntu and Debian, between Linux and BSD, between PHP and Python. Sure, the "experts" look down on it, but the first are the stuff that gets used by noobs who might or might not become experts (if they even have a desire too) while the second are the stuff people TELL you you must use before they even consider talking to you.
I know some people who never coded anything yet messed around with Arduino after buying a kit and did some silly little projects that won't amaze anyone bit it was fun for them, not unlike the electronic kits you could buy when I was a kid. Sure sure, if you all did it from scratch with a soldering iron, you no doubt ended up a much better kind of human being but us mere dregs had to make due with simpler tools. And get things done.
When it comes time for you to move on, as you outgrow the Arduino, you can go for the more specialist tools and hopefully overcome the lack of manuals and guides. But some people need the training wheels and sneering at them is only get you complete and utter contempt from all the non-pricks in this world.
Like I have utter contempt for a person who lists as an alternative a board that isn't available at the stated price anymore and another board that has a shipping time of anywhere from a week to a month depending on what the supplier feels like and neither has anywhere near the 3rd party support.
Let me know when I can give away an arduino kit and have someone make something immediatly even if it is as trivial as a led lighting up to a light sensor but THEY did it, themselves and get that makers spirit burning in another product that is both as forgiving AND as flexible, THEN you can come back.
No doubt people like taktoa scoff at childrens books too because for less you can buy great literature, in latin!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'll tell you 'why arduino': its the community, the examples, the help, the web blogs that have snippets you need to integrate and get a product working, fast.
THAT's why.
its not about the chip. there were always better chips.
the abstraction, community support is what makes the system a winner.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."