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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.
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.
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
$2 is only 16 bits, since a quarter is 2 bits...