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A 32-bit Development System For $2
An anonymous reader writes "If you are too cheap to buy a $20 Arduino or too elitist to not have at least a 32-bit processor, Dr. Dobb's shows you how to take a $2 chip, put it on a breadboard with a TTL serial (or USB) cable, and be up and running with a 32-bit C/C++ system. Even if you have to buy the breadboard and the cable, it is comparable in price to an Arduino and much more capable. The Mbed libraries (optional) make it as easy to use a 'duino, too."
So you can take a $2 microcontroller, put it on your $10 breadbord, power it with your $100 variable power supply, wire it up with your $5 eBay chi.com wires, and talk to it with your $12 FTDI adapter. SO WHAT? This isn't news. This is what ARM developers have been doing since the damn chips came out.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of... oh, forget it.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Digi-Key $3.48 and Mouser $3.49
Still could be something you can have a lot of fun with!
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
If you are going to go with an individual chip to be put on a breadboard or a breakout board, there have been a wide variety of chips in the $2-5 range for years. And like every other step of the price ladder, there are newer, better ones each year. The chips on a lot of the dev boards, even some $100+ ones are quite cheap. What you are paying for is the convenience of someone setting up a communication layer for you and having it all soldered together in a compact design. If you are trying to save money, you always have the option of using the chip directly, although some faster, smaller ones might be more difficult to setup depending on your soldering and PCB making skills. Although some of the cheap dev boards come out to about the same cost as buying a USB communication chip and socket anyway because they are selling at a loss or using volume discounts, so it is difficult to get the exact same prices of less. But if you already have a USB to TTL cable of some sorts, you just need the main processor chip in a lot of cases. Then it is about making sure you can initially program the chip, and it is useful to have good instructions (like this article) or tutorial instead of working that out from the datasheet.
I used to love Dr Dobbs. But unfortunately had to give up my expensive Dr Dobb's habit, when it went online-only, and turned into a cheesy website peddling little but warmed-over stuff from elsewhere, and paid puffery. Too bad.
Here's a better one-chip sollution:
MicroMite.
PIC32 running a full BASIC interperter (ANSI X3.113-1987, with optional line numbers, structured programming features like do loops, multiline if statements, user defined subroutines and functions. )
You don't even need to install Arduino or another IDE to use-it - you just need a VT100 terminal emulator and use the built-in editor.
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I dig that the chip in TFA is DIP...but soldering TQFP isn't that tough... same cost, much more power in the Teensy 3.1. Also less of a hack than what's described in the article.
look forward to buying one, playing with it for a day, then throwing it in a drawer, never to be seen until I move.
Or the TI LAUNCHPAD boards, they are Cortex-M4Fs and quite capable.
Huh? Have you actually looked at it in the last few years?
This quarter, Walter Bright on writing languages, Dave Thomas (the Ruby guy) on why he regrets being one of the original signers of the the Agile Manifesto, Cay Horstmann's lengthy tutorial on Java 8 lambdas, Microsoft's compiler team on the most underused compiler switches for Visual C++. In addition, Jolt Awards, salary survey, and editorials that aren't shy, like this week's on companies using OSS without buying licenses. I read and love Dr. Dobb's and don't in anyway recognize what you're talking about.
The cheapest breadboard I could find was $30.
In other news, I also figured out how to get a great ride for $1. All you need to do is add a $1 car freshener to your existing BMW.
Spending a little more money up front often pays off with a better product, bigger user community, more sample code, more documentation... and no breadboarding!
If you sign up with Microchip as a dev, they'll send you small numbers of their chips for free. These can be set up to work with next to zero external components. You will need some kind of programmer though.
Good luck trying to get these in Europe. They are pretty much unobtanium, because nobody stocks them or they sell these only to companies (Farnell), with a huge shipping and handling markup (Digikey, Mouser, Farnell) or they simply don't carry the DIP version at all (RadioSpares).
It is way easier to buy one of the QFP packages - they are both cheaper, more available and with more pins. And either get it pre-soldered on a breakout board or buy a simple QFP to DIP adapter on eBay (or make your own).
Google the difference between a microcontroller (this, Arduinos, etc) and microprocessor (RaspberryPi). They both have their advantages and disadvantages and areas that they are designed for.
I'm partial to the STM32 discovery & nucleo boards. They are cheap. Ranging from $7-15 or so depending on the model. Variants with Cortex M0, M3, M4.
Development on STM32 can be done on entirely open source tools too, which is nice. With GCC,
libopencm3, and
linux st-link support.
Sent from my PDP-11
A 1mm 3D printer nozzle? What is this, 2007?
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$2 is only 16 bits, since a quarter is 2 bits...
The PIC32 MCUs are a bit more expensive. Around $4.20 for single orders. But they're also clocked higher. The PIC32MX is an 80Mhz part. The one in the ARM in the article is 48 Mhz. There is also a big difference in RAM and FLASH. The arm has 4k and 32k. The PIC32MX has 64k and 512k.
Of course if you're really wanting to play with the MCHP parts its best to go with the starter kits, which makes them much more expensive than the $3 in the article. But then you get a USB debug port, a USB port to play with, and on some of the kits you get Ethernet as well. Which is much more than what the breadboard in the article is talking about, and you don't need a flash programmer. If you're really serious to get into embedded controllers this is probably the way to go, since you save the price of your flash programmer/debugger.
You could always wait for the PIC32MZ as well, which is a 200 Mhz part, more RAM and more FLASH.
Software Engineer & Writer of Military Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog: petermwright.com Twitter: WrightPeterM