15 ms·

Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1

929 points by stefanpie 9y ago

aj7 9y ago
My compliments for fixing your link loading problem in short order.
m_eiman 9y ago
Perhaps Jay should have hosted the page on a microcontroller instead of a database; archive copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20171106070102/https://jaycarlson.net/microcontrollers/ https://web.archive.org/web/20171106070102/https://jaycarlso...
- macrohouse 9y ago
  any one can host the page on microcontroller
- inasring 9y ago
  it's HN's hug of death
  - reidrac 9y ago
    I'm sure that doesn't exist. I've had my site in the front page several times and I never had a problem. I agree I'm a competent sysadm and there's a peak on visits often in a short period, but my server is not as optimised as it could be and it did just fine. I think what we have here is a server or a web app poorly configured.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      HN Managed to kill the uplink of my provider...
      - Matheus28 9y ago
        HN doesn't have that much traffic, your provider is probably crap
    - emiliobumachar 9y ago
      What percentage of websites would you think are cared for by a sysadmin at least as competent as yourself, who dedicated at least as much time as you did?
- dblboy 9y ago
  much appreciated, thanks!
- jaydcarlson 9y ago
  With 21 of these parts on my desk, that would have been a good idea. Thanks for linking to a cached version — I'm working to get my little blog on Cloudflare to handle the traffic. I appreciate the kind words from everyone so far; it's been a huge learning opportunity, and I hope others can get inspired to grab one of these parts (especially one of the weirder ones) and do something cool with it.
  - ctack 9y ago
    Not your issue, but the current timeout Cloudflare page is saying that thanks to it's "Always Online™" technology, we can surf a snapshot of the site. But there is link or option to said snapshot :/
  - uuoc 9y ago
    While you are at it, here is how your little blog looks to those of us who browse with javascript off for security reasons: https://pixady.com/image/0jab/ https://pixady.com/image/0jab/ Even though all the text content is present (this image is disabling CSS and scrolling down a little): http://pixady.com/image/0jad/ http://pixady.com/image/0jad/ Requiring javascript for rendering what basic HTML already renders is not a very inviting or inclusive way to go with the blog.
  - hathawsh 9y ago
    I would pay for a book version of this work, or at least a PDF that I could print. It would be the kind of book that I could really get into. Fantastic work.
    - throwawaybbqed 9y ago
      I'd like to second that. I skimmed through this yesterday and about to board a long flight. Frantically caching :-p
halamadrid 9y ago
The waybackmachine link didn't work for me, but this did: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://jaycarlson.net/microcontrollers/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
- morg123 9y ago
  The waybackmachine link didn't work for me either. Thanks for the new one.
- VMG 9y ago
  "Remember websites" yeah they always had scaling problems unfortunately :(
cjsuk 9y ago
That’s a rather good article. I will digest that today. I’m currently using Cypress’s PSoC line (4200M boards) for a couple of personal projects. The reconfigurable hardware and analogue parts actually kill a lot of external hardware. It’s pretty amazing and ridiculously cheap. Visual Studio is the IDE for this. https://uk.rs-online.com/mobile/p/processor-microcontroller-development-kits/1244185/ https://uk.rs-online.com/mobile/p/processor-microcontroller-... Note: don’t just jump into these if you think it’s just a better Arduino as the learning curve is extreme. You really have to know your stuff before you open the box.
- joezydeco 9y ago
  PSoC is an underrated line of parts. Now that they've dropped the wacky 8051-alike used in the older models and switched to ARM, there's a lot more you can do with these things.
  - jason_s 9y ago
    hope the development toolchain is better than it was 6 or 7 years ago... I wanted to look into PSoC but couldn't figure out how to blink an LED after a few hours of messing around with it, so I gave up. And I'm not a beginner; I've had 22 years of microcontroller experience.
    - joezydeco 9y ago
      It's still heavily dependent on the IDE, but at least you're not bound to the compilers that were used 6 or 7 years ago. The better compiler of the two was bought by Microchip and subsequently abandoned/crippled-on-purpose for the PSoC instruction set.
- 05 9y ago
  £8 is not even close to 'ridiculously cheap', compared to, say, Cortex-M0 STM32 boards for $1.5 with free shipping https://www.ebay.com/itm/1PCS-STM32F030F4P6-ARM-CORTEX-M0-Core-Minimum-System-Dev-Board-for-Arduino/182216811895?epid=556113683&hash=item2a6cf7e577:g:aDAAAOSwSv1Xkte~ https://www.ebay.com/itm/1PCS-STM32F030F4P6-ARM-CORTEX-M0-Co...
xt00 9y ago
Now if somebody from China can make a list of the cheap micros under 1-2 RMB, now that would be a nice list for super low cost stuff.. that I'd be very interested in...
- raverbashing 9y ago
  For that price I'd believe you can get only those without packaging
- cjsuk 9y ago
  I think you can get 8051 parts for that.
  - xt00 9y ago
    Yea I'm hoping somebody can provide a list of various manufacturers and part names similar to the article..
    - jaydcarlson 9y ago
      My article includes the Holtek HT-66, the STCmicro STC8, the Nuvoton N76, and the ST STM8 — all hover in the 1-2 RMB range (especially when purchased in volume from within the mainland). The STC8 and N76 parts are 8051, the other two are their own design. The HT-66 looks very much like a PIC16 part, and IDE and compiler are totally free. The STM8 is probably the best-performing part in that price range, and has a free IDE and compiler. My review includes pretty extensive discussion on the main page, plus separate reviews for all these parts — check it out and let me know if I need to clarify anything!
      - caust1c 9y ago
        This is a great blog post but I'd also like to throw in that the STM line has a pretty great linux toolchain (official or not, I'm not sure). I made a repository for the toolchain necessary to get STM boards working here: https://github.com/abraithwaite/STM32 https://github.com/abraithwaite/STM32 Although it's outdated, the links at the bottom appear to link to updated tools which are presumably better :-)
Yaggo 9y ago
Didn't read all the author's criteria, but esp8266 is worth mentioning in the context of cheap microcontrollers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266
- restricted_ptr 9y ago
  Yep, enjoyed this one.
- blhack 9y ago
  I am falling in love with wemos's breakout boards for ESP. For instance, this one: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/WeMos-D1-ESP-Wroom-02-ESP8266-Nodemcu-WiFi-Module-With-18650-Battery-Charging/32817675179.html?ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_2_10152_10065_10151_10068_10130_10344_10345_10547_10342_10343_10546_10340_10341_10548_10545_10541_10307_10060_10155_10154_10056_10055_10539_10537_10536_10059_10534_10533_100031_10103_10102_10142_10107_10324_10325_10562_10084_10083_10561_10178_10312_10313_10314_10550_10073_10551_10552_10553_10554_10557_10558-10550,searchweb201603_1,ppcSwitch_5&btsid=e1aae482-0c4a-4b5b-9dd9-ac5cda98f697&algo_expid=8ab3d1af-a0d5-47e9-a01d-a89c2e861f08-2&algo_pvid=8ab3d1af-a0d5-47e9-a01d-a89c2e861f08 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/WeMos-D1-ESP-Wroom-02-ESP826... This is an ESP8266 breakout/programmer for about ~$3: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/ESP8266-ESP12-ESP-12-WeMos-D1-Mini-WIFI-Dev-Kit-Development-Board-NodeMCU-Lua/32653918483.html?ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_2_10152_10065_10151_10068_10130_10344_10345_10547_10342_10343_10546_10340_10341_10548_10545_10541_10307_10060_10155_10154_10056_10055_10539_10537_10536_10059_10534_10533_100031_10103_10102_10142_10107_10324_10325_10562_10084_10083_10561_10178_10312_10313_10314_10550_10073_10551_10552_10553_10554_10557_10558-10550,searchweb201603_1,ppcSwitch_5&btsid=08a29c25-5462-4269-b59f-aba059e2f7cf&algo_expid=61c40478-e028-4e04-b853-fc44623a7f9e-0&algo_pvid=61c40478-e028-4e04-b853-fc44623a7f9e https://www.aliexpress.com/item/ESP8266-ESP12-ESP-12-WeMos-D... Absolutely incredible stuff. Ordered this one coming soon: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/WEMOS-WiFi-Bluetooth-Battery-ESP32-development-tool-ESP32-battery-esp8266-ESP-WROOM-32-ESP32/32819459737.html?ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_2_10152_10065_10151_10068_10130_10344_10345_10547_10342_10343_10546_10340_10341_10548_10545_10541_10307_10060_10155_10154_10056_10055_10539_10537_10536_10059_10534_10533_100031_10103_10102_10142_10107_10324_10325_10562_10084_10083_10561_10178_10312_10313_10314_10550_10073_10551_10552_10553_10554_10557_10558,searchweb201603_1,ppcSwitch_5&btsid=6afe83b5-f204-431c-bb21-130bd4bd77e5&algo_expid=2d089ef2-2fcc-4aba-ad2d-b8a0cd3b5a6d-0&algo_pvid=2d089ef2-2fcc-4aba-ad2d-b8a0cd3b5a6d https://www.aliexpress.com/item/WEMOS-WiFi-Bluetooth-Battery... And in the realm of awesome breakouts that I'm excited for: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2pcs-TTGO-LORA-SX1278-ESP32-0-96-OLED-16-Mt-bytes-128-Mt-bit-433Mhz-for/32833821668.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2pcs-TTGO-LORA-SX1278-ESP32-... There is some really incredible stuff coming out based on the ESP8266 and ESP32 right now. IMO completely blows all of the normal arduino stuff out of the water.
alister 9y ago
If I hadn't seen this article on Hacker News today, is there any combination of plausible keywords I could have typed into Google to find this particular article if I were looking for an in-depth review of microcontrollers? I tried "best microcontrollers reviewed", "best low-cost microcontrollers", "survey of microcontrollers", and a bunch of others. Nothing that Google finds in the first 10-20 hits is as good this resource, other than Wikipedia, though very good, isn't a technical review. I suppose the lessons are: there's room for lots of improvement in search engines, or SEO really works and you better promote yourself no matter how good you are, or word of mouth (Hacker News in this case) is still the way to find the best stuff.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > I suppose the lessons are: there's room for lots of improvement in search engines, or SEO really works and you better promote yourself no matter how good you are, or word of mouth (Hacker News in this case) is still the way to find the best stuff. The way I look at it: SEO really works, and shit sources tend to spend a lot on it, while quality sources tend to not spend anything on it at all - therefore a lot of quality stuff is hard to find, unless you can hear the right words from the right mouths. (IMO SEO, beyond making your website not look like shit, is user-hostile behaviour. It games search engines into serving users links to those who spend effort on gaming search engines instead of links to content the user was looking for.)
  - blauditore 9y ago
    Indeed. SEO how it's referred to and done most of the time is almost an anti-pattern: People adjust their system (website) to implementation details of another service (search engines) instead of just fulfilling the "public contract" (exposing good, accessible content). But that's dangerous, as search engines evolve, change behavior and occasionally penalize this kind of behavior. That's why I always tried to explain to customers they should just focus on good content for humans and not care about explicit SEO after they claimed someone had told them that Google had recently "changed their algorithm" and now did XY.
    - 9y ago
0xbear 9y ago
What's really amazing is that for less than $5 nowadays you can have a 1GHz+ quad core ARM Cortex-a53 with FPU and NEON support. I mean, sure, your entire device will be more than $5, and it'll be kinda power hungry at 3W or so running full tilt, but that's a pretty beefy chip for the price of a venti Starbucks latte, capable of running full Linux, with GPU, media encode/decode, etc, etc.
- hwh 9y ago
  It is all a question of use case. This reply comes up all the time when I talk about how I use microcontrollers and what I use them for. For myself, microcontrollers offer me maximum control with minimum overhead. No OS, or maybe just some RTOS that does not really "boot" except for copying initial values for variables from Flash into RAM, being done in a fraction of a second. Switch it on, off it goes. Interfacing with SRAM and Flash without a driver. You can do MCU based PCB designs. It gets harder when it comes to the mentioned Cortex-A. It will be harder to sample, say, 40 pieces of them. You're very much supposed (and better off) to buy boards like OrangePi or similar. ESP designs, especially ESP32, are somewhat in between. Started off as a little documented blackbox with a RTOS interface it is now a much better (but absolutely not on par with Cortex-M designs) documented platform. However, part of it is still a proprietary code blob. They are beefy beasts, however, and when you need just that - well, it's a no-brainer. I just wish they were documented like STM32s plus ARM manuals and had a little more toolchain support. The price tag keeps me from complaining any louder. When you don't really have hard constraints and are fine with a 5 second bootup, chose whatever fits your bill. When exact timing is an issue (and you don't want to go bare metal on the Cortex-A), when fast bootup is an issue, well - better look at MCUs.
  - 0xbear 9y ago
    Not gonna argue with that. I do use MCUs myself where appropriate. I like that they’re more hardware than software: flash the thing once and it will work every time from there on out. Very few moving parts, everything is very simple, power consumption is measured in milliwatts. But it still blows my mind that the equivalent (a vast superset, if you consider the GPU and specialized coprocessors) of my workstation from the late 90s now costs less than $5.
kirillkh 9y ago
Can any of these be programmed with Rust?
- techdragon 9y ago
  Seriously curious about this. If not these ones, what other microcontrollers have decent or better rust support? Is there a list somewhere? I'm keen to have more practical uses for my rust skills so I can enjoy using rust without having to find excuses to use it where I would be more productive with other languages.
  - steveklabnik 9y ago
    Your sibling has some good links, but a decent way to think about it is, from hard to easy: * does it have an LLVM backend? * is it listed on the forge page? * is it listed as having std support? The farther you go down this list, the simpler it gets to use Rust for it. Latest work has been on ARM boards and a ton of work on AVR, which brings 8/16 but support.
- dthul 9y ago
  Yes! Theoretically anything that Rust has support for (https://forge.rust-lang.org/platform-support.html https://forge.rust-lang.org/platform-support.html) but I think most work has been put into ARM Cortex-M support recently. Especially Jorge Aparicio has worked to make embedded programming in Rust a joy (see https://japaric.github.io/discovery/ https://japaric.github.io/discovery/ for an introduction). If you use STM32F MCUs you will probably have the lowest friction. I've heard of other people using the NXP Kinetis lineup as well. Do mind though that there are not many peripheral libraries yet. Currently I myself am fighting with getting USB to work. Of course you could still use the vendor provided C libraries and link against them if you don't want to go for 100% Rust. The best part: You can use many of Rust's high level zero-cost abstractions. Just take a look at this example code which compiles to very efficient assembly: https://github.com/japaric/discovery/blob/116fe76491d661b5ee8b2564442f6b2787a29bf4/src/05-led-roulette/my-solution.md https://github.com/japaric/discovery/blob/116fe76491d661b5ee...
rowthri 9y ago
I tried "best microcontrollers reviewed", "best low-cost microcontrollers", "survey of microcontrollers", and a bunch of others. Nothing that Google finds in the first 10-20 hits is as good this resource, other than Wikipedia, though very good, isn't a technical review.
sgt 9y ago
["amazing", "\$1", "microcontroller"]. HN, you really know how to make me click a link within no more than 20 ms from seeing the front page.
dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
> And even if it were properly executed, I think I reject the underlying goal of this strategy. The whole purpose of using an Arduino UNO form-factor is to support Arduino shields — yet I have never seen an Arduino shield on the desk of a professional engineer or advanced hobbyist. At least, not one plugged into one of these “Uno form-factor” dev boards. I have to chime in. What's the point of using the UNO form factor if you don't support the shields, libraries or the environment? It makes completely no sense.
- Hasz 9y ago
  The code. The shields are pretty worthless, but the availability of libraries and example code is excellent. Instead of working out all the fine details of I2C, I can call a well developed function that takes care of all that for me. Instead of spending days writing a graphics library, I can find an off the shelf GFX library that has more features/is faster/ etc The ability to move quickly with well documented, prebuilt libraries is invaluable when you want to get something up and running ASAP. Once you're ready to develop it, then you can go back, strip out everything that's not needed, rewrite things, etc. That's the beauty of Arduino.
  - Doxin 9y ago
    Hint if you're going the no-shields route: Go for the arduino pro mini. It's the same thing in a different format, and a bunch cheaper.
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    The problem is that there are a lot of Arduino form-factor mainboards from other manufacturers (like the one in the article) which have no code provided. But manufacturers cargo-cult into the form factor without realizing that code is the important thing.
Steeeve 9y ago
Was it running the website?
rajini79 9y ago
good information
macrohouse 9y ago
any one can host the page on microcontroller
purplezooey 9y ago
site is down
hahamrfunnyguy 9y ago
If I am sourcing a part, I usually start with an objective comparison search on a distributors web site (https://www.mouser.com/search/Refine.aspx?N=17176544&Ns=Pricing%7c0 https://www.mouser.com/search/Refine.aspx?N=17176544&Ns=Pric...). There's even lots of sub-dollar MCUs out there too. As the author notes, picking the best one depends a lot on what you need to do.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  There's a lot that's not covered in a parametric search listing. In your link, picking a core doesn't tell you how good the peripherals are. (Digikey's parametric search [1] does give you a lot more information about what peripherals are available where Mouser doesn't even mention it). Clock frequency doesn't tell you how many cycles the instructions take. And none of that tells me anything about power consumption or performance in a typical application, or especially about the usability of the toolchains. If answering "it depends on what you need to do" requires a lot of domain expertise to evaluate, there's definitely a place for summaries like this! [1]: https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/embedded-microcontrollers/685 https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/...
abetusk 9y ago
The most relevant part for me is this cherry picked line from the article: ... Consequently, the megaAVR remains the most open-source 8-bit microcontroller on the market — by a long shot. ... Even though the Atmel AVRs aren't the fastest, or cheapest (in cost per unit) or the toolchain isn't the easiest to use or the debugging capabilities aren't as good, the fact that it's open-source makes it win, hands down. There's a reason why nearly every hobby electronics project you see has an Arduino in it. Assuming the Arduino IDE is installed and permissions issues have been resolved, you can go from unboxing your Arduino to making it blink in under 60 seconds. In addition, places like Adafruit [1] and Sparkfun [2] build their own boards and make most of their code free/libre/open-source [3] [4], with a large focus on Arduino. It'll be interesting to see how the electronics market evolves when the current and subsequent generations are trained on AVRs. [1] https://www.adafruit.com/ https://www.adafruit.com/ [2] https://www.sparkfun.com/ https://www.sparkfun.com/ [3] https://github.com/adafruit https://github.com/adafruit [4] https://github.com/sparkfun https://github.com/sparkfun
- fermienrico 9y ago
  ESP8266 and ESP32 trumps AVR in every respect, including their openness.
  - tomcam 9y ago
    They don’t meet the explicitly stated $1 goal
    - fermienrico 9y ago
      Understand and I am very well aware having purchased over 20k ESP32 MCUs. However, the parent comment that I responded to is talking about opensource aspects and community of AVR microcontroller to which I responded that Espressif is not only cost competitive, but it beats AVR in every aspect (perhaps you can say it's not as mature of an ecosystem).
- radix07 9y ago
  Open source hardware in the microcontroller world isn't quite as big of a deal as it is in the software world. While it would be great to see the processor architecture and all, I would much rather have an ARM that I know works and won't have to look at. I believe modern Arduinos are going to Cortex processors which are ARM as well, so I don't think the open source claim is what keeps Arduino hardware going. It is most likely going to be ease of use, accessibility, community and the tools.
visarga 9y ago
It's not just microcontrollers that are amazing: using a cheap phone can give you a screen, a battery, 3G and sensors.
ammu1966 9y ago
Yep, I loved this one.
jaydcarlson 9y ago
I've made some network changes, and the site should be back up for most users — let me know if anyone is running into issues!
neya 9y ago
I've had the best overall experience using an ATTINY85 [1]. It almost serves my purpose for every use case I've had in the past couple of years - Running steppers, basic home automation, wireless, etc. If you buy them in bulk, you can get it down to less than $1 per MC. [2] You can even install Arduino libs on it and the Arduino interface has quite good support for it as well. Some of my projects with it include a DSLR camera slider [3], wireless home automation (turn off lights when I'm not in the room, communicate with my air-conditioner to maintain the room temperature using IR, etc.) [1] http://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATtiny85 http://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATtiny85 [2] https://www.ebay.com/itm/5PCS-ATTINY85-20PU-IC-MCU-8BIT-8KB-FLASH-8DIP-Top-ATTINY85-/192263968340 https://www.ebay.com/itm/5PCS-ATTINY85-20PU-IC-MCU-8BIT-8KB-... [3] https://www.instagram.com/p/1AscllHDQ0/?taken-by=discovery.diary https://www.instagram.com/p/1AscllHDQ0/?taken-by=discovery.d...
- kirillkh 9y ago
  Do you just use development boards with these? And which ones?
  - neya 9y ago
    The AT Tiny can be programmed with an Arduino Uno, which is what I used. It's pretty easy. But there are also cheaper boards specifically for the AT Tiny.
  - DSMan195276 9y ago
    You don't really need a dev board for these, you can just stick them in a breadboard and go, they're already in a DIP package and don't really need any extra circuitry besides what you're going to connect them to. You can also program them using basically any other micro-controller you may have, or use a cheap USB programmer to do it, so they're pretty cheap to get started with (Though it's not exactly as user-friendly as plugging an Arduino into USB).
kristinmick21 9y ago
It's not just micro-controllers that are amazing: using a cheap phone can give you a screen, a battery, 3G & sensors. reply
pjc50 9y ago
This is a fantastic article, a thesis-length piece of work covering the subject from every possible angle. And it's all on a single page, not an ad-encumbered pagethrough like some review sites. Ecosystem is an interesting area. It seems that everyone has converged on Eclipse, which is probably better than trying to write their own environment but can still be infuriatingly clunky at times. I'm impressed with the breadth of this review and the commitment to including everything that fits in the $1 parameter - which is now quite a lot, I hadn't expected to see Cypress PSOC there.
dragontamer 9y ago
I'm not as much of an expert as the writer of this page, but this looks legit. The major $1 microcontrollers that I've worked with (Atmel series) as well as the ones that have a LOT of buzz recently (The ST STM32F0 and TI's MSP420) are all discussed and compared.
- amitprayal 9y ago
  You mean TI's MSP430
VLM 9y ago
No love for the PIC10 series? Perhaps too many PIC already in the review would make it look like a MicroCHIP(TM) press release. I do see some justification in that the 10F series is more of the twenty five cents class not the $1 class. Those things are strangely charming, I had a lot of fun with the now-discontinued 10F2xx series. Adjusted for inflation the 10F3xx are now cheaper than the 10F2xx were, which is cool. Its strange to drink a can of diet coke knowing it costs 3 times as much as the controller you're troubleshooting. Another novelty of small/cheap controllers is when I was playing with the defunct 10F2xx family I didn't own a meter sensitive enough to measure the current draw at 32 khz clock. I do now, but it was an expensive meter! In the old days cheap EE would wire up a capacitor and run the ckt off the cap and time how long the voltage drop took and use that to create an imaginary resistance and use the measured V and theoretical R to calculate the theoretical current. Of course my cheap meter drew more current than the microcontroller which leads to weird games like sample voltage for a second. Also leakage currents in most caps is larger than the uC current draw oh so much fun fun fun. One trick is to drive a square wave generator thru a diode to a low leakage ceramic disk cap, assuming your reset circuitry is faster than the square wave and you trust the DC response of your scope. Another thing I tried was creating a transfer function where a 100 watt lightbulb and a tiny solar panel generate say, 1 mA, so a 99.9% optical attenuator in front of the cell means 1 uA, right? Of course sleep current is a tiny fraction of that, so you stack a SECOND optical attenuator on the solar cell, say merely 99% blocking, and that should be 10 nA which is about half sleep current, right? You can also play games when your CPU costs 30 cents like hooking up 100 in parallel for $30 to measure 100x average current. Low current is fun if you're ever bored.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Whenever this kind of low current stuff is discussed, I like to bring up the master, Bob Pease: http://www.electronicdesign.com/test-amp-measurement/whats-all-femtoampere-stuff-anyhow http://www.electronicdesign.com/test-amp-measurement/whats-a... (also the article has reservations about PIC, pointing out its strangenesses and describing PIC24 as underwhelming)
syntaxing 9y ago
Completely off topic but does anyone know what the site is running and whether its a "theme"? I'm planning to write something technical and I am a huge fan on how the website is structured.
- pjc50 9y ago
  A quick look at the source suggests it's Wordpress with "TheGem" theme.
  - syntaxing 9y ago
    Awesome! Thank you!
jokoon 9y ago
Well at this point all I would like to get is a USB-powered linux in a card, with wifi, optionally with a screen capable enough to display 3 or 4 lines of text. I mean raspberry is cool, cheap and everything, but I'd prefer something all integrated, as small as the raspberry pi zero, less fragile (meaning I can put in my pocket or bag, and still expect it to work), not necessarily with pins. I don't know about what the demand is for micro-controllers, but as a consumer and a developer, having a wifi-capable portable micro computer would really be cool. Does it already exist? Under $50?
- ketsa 9y ago
  We call those "smartphone."
- joezydeco 9y ago
  It's getting close. There are newer SoCs that are MMU capable and also contain enough RAM and Flash to run a small Linux instance off a single part...or a single part with some simple QSPI flash hung off of it. Renesas has the RZ line that can do this, but it will probably take up $30-$35 of your $50 budget.
- iuguy 9y ago
  Not quite, and for various reasons. What would you want by way of input on such a device? I've been working on something like this based on TI OMAP CPUs, and the hardest thing (after a decent semi-open SoC) is getting a decent keyboard. I think the N800 was probably the pinnacle of handheld Linux devices (or the Psion 5 series if you step outside of Linux). You could look at the Raspberry Pi handheld game console options out there, but ultimately there's little that can compete with a Pi Zero, battery pack and ILI9341 screen on price.
- davandg 9y ago
  I think that Linus is too heavy for a very cheap "CPU". If by Linux you mean "something easy to develop on", then most micro-controllers come nowadays with an Arduino compatible layer. If you remove the Linux part from your wishlist, you can consider some "NodeMCU" boards on Chinese websites, eg: https://www.banggood.com/Wemos-NODEMCU-ESP8266-12F-WiFi-1_30_96-Inch-OLED-BoardBottom-Plate-p-1176035.html https://www.banggood.com/Wemos-NODEMCU-ESP8266-12F-WiFi-1_30... https://www.banggood.com/Wemos-TTGO-WiFi-Bluetooth-Battery-ESP32-0_96-Inch-OLED-Development-Tool-p-1213497.html https://www.banggood.com/Wemos-TTGO-WiFi-Bluetooth-Battery-E...
j_s 9y ago
What is the minimum horsepower to build a WiFi KVM? The monitor part seems toughest; if it's possible to do so cheaply I don't care how fast it updates. I plan on trying out this $12 ESP8266-based device which ships configured as a USB serial port -- I plan on using it as a serial console. It would be awesome if I could convince it to somehow act as a USB VGA-enough and see both the boot/BIOS screens and the OS GUI. https://github.com/whid-injector/WHID https://github.com/whid-injector/WHID
- jo909 9y ago
  USB mouse and keyboard is already possible on ESP8266: https://github.com/cnlohr/espusb https://github.com/cnlohr/espusb As for VGA i think you are out of luck, or need a faster/specialized co-processor. VGA requires 3 analog inputs of at least ~30MHz, and an ESP8266 has one analog input in the low (I think I've seen 20) kHz range, so more than 1000 times too slow.
  - j_s 9y ago
    Thanks much for taking the time to share your expertise in answering my question!
    - jo909 9y ago
      You're welcome. I looked into it because it would make a pretty cool project and while pretty advanced, not impossible. The cheapest analog-digital-converter chip I found is the TVP7002. Dealing with the digital pixel output is still way way too much data, but now it might be possible to scan the picture a few pixels each loop. The reasonable approach would be to process it in an FPGA or specialized chip and only deal with a compressed and scaled image in the ESP8266.
bhu1st 9y ago
Not in the list but I used Atmel AT89S51/52, built basic line tracking robot, pc controlled bot, relay driver, home automation etc http://www.atmel.com/images/doc1919.pdf http://www.atmel.com/images/doc1919.pdf
jventura 9y ago
Maybe is not the best topic to ask, but does anyone know good sources (websites, books, kits) for playing with and learning a bit more about microcontrollers and electronics? I would prefer structured sources (those that take newbies by hand) than unstructured ones.. I used to play a little bit with the nerdkits (http://www.nerdkits.com http://www.nerdkits.com) and really enjoyed their approach but they seem to have gone out of business and their content has not been updated for some years..
- pp19dd 9y ago
  One quick thing you can get into is assembling electronics kits. Granted it's not programming, design, or theory, but it's an interesting alternative that'll get you started without having to catch up on theory. All you need is the kit and a few basic tools, like a soldering iron, some tweezers and pliers. There's a person (fairly active on reddit, I believe) who put together a youtube channel reviewing such kits. Sadly he stopped posting new videos years ago (bored and moved on?) Think he's an EE or something comparable for work, but, in either case take a look at some of his offerings: https://www.youtube.com/user/SUBLOOP/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/SUBLOOP/videos The video that I got started with and caught my attention was his "Active Speakers" kit, part 2. They're entertaining, his soldering is just hypnotic, and it covered some troubleshooting you'd run into with electronics.
- deeg 9y ago
  adafruit.com and sparkfun.com are two of my go-tos. Pretty strong community support.
  - jventura 9y ago
    Thanks for your input, I briefly checked those links and they seem to be stores and quite overwhelming in their range of products and tutorials. What I'm looking for is mostly project tutorials or books at a basic level, as in "how do I start?". For instance, the nerdkit had me build a temperature sensor from the most basic parts and display the temperature in a LCD (bundled with the kit). Any other suggestions? Edit: typos
jhallenworld 9y ago
Not the cheapest perhaps, but I recently used Ambiq's Apollo for a project. It's an ultra low power ARM MCU. I found it very nice to use mainly because Ambiq only has two models at this point, which makes their libraries very clean. The other advantage is that its I2C slave core operates autonomously- it provides a shared register space. It means that a master can write a bunch of stuff to the shared memory without waking up the CPU during each transaction (which usually involves clock stretching).
nojvek 9y ago
That website took forever to load at 100kbps. So long I cancelled and started with comments. I know this is off topic but would love HN to show a page size besides each link so we know whether the link is even worth opening.

929 points by stefanpie 9y ago

aj7 9y ago

My compliments for fixing your link loading problem in short order.

Perhaps Jay should have hosted the page on a microcontroller instead of a database; archive copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20171106070102/https://jaycarlson.net/microcontrollers/ https://web.archive.org/web/20171106070102/https://jaycarlso...

macrohouse 9y ago
any one can host the page on microcontroller
inasring 9y ago
it's HN's hug of death
- reidrac 9y ago
  I'm sure that doesn't exist. I've had my site in the front page several times and I never had a problem. I agree I'm a competent sysadm and there's a peak on visits often in a short period, but my server is not as optimised as it could be and it did just fine. I think what we have here is a server or a web app poorly configured.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    HN Managed to kill the uplink of my provider...
    - Matheus28 9y ago
      HN doesn't have that much traffic, your provider is probably crap
  - emiliobumachar 9y ago
    What percentage of websites would you think are cared for by a sysadmin at least as competent as yourself, who dedicated at least as much time as you did?
dblboy 9y ago
much appreciated, thanks!
jaydcarlson 9y ago
With 21 of these parts on my desk, that would have been a good idea. Thanks for linking to a cached version — I'm working to get my little blog on Cloudflare to handle the traffic. I appreciate the kind words from everyone so far; it's been a huge learning opportunity, and I hope others can get inspired to grab one of these parts (especially one of the weirder ones) and do something cool with it.
- ctack 9y ago
  Not your issue, but the current timeout Cloudflare page is saying that thanks to it's "Always Online™" technology, we can surf a snapshot of the site. But there is link or option to said snapshot :/
- uuoc 9y ago
  While you are at it, here is how your little blog looks to those of us who browse with javascript off for security reasons: https://pixady.com/image/0jab/ https://pixady.com/image/0jab/ Even though all the text content is present (this image is disabling CSS and scrolling down a little): http://pixady.com/image/0jad/ http://pixady.com/image/0jad/ Requiring javascript for rendering what basic HTML already renders is not a very inviting or inclusive way to go with the blog.
- hathawsh 9y ago
  I would pay for a book version of this work, or at least a PDF that I could print. It would be the kind of book that I could really get into. Fantastic work.
  - throwawaybbqed 9y ago
    I'd like to second that. I skimmed through this yesterday and about to board a long flight. Frantically caching :-p

halamadrid 9y ago

The waybackmachine link didn't work for me, but this did: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://jaycarlson.net/microcontrollers/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

morg123 9y ago
The waybackmachine link didn't work for me either. Thanks for the new one.
VMG 9y ago
"Remember websites" yeah they always had scaling problems unfortunately :(

cjsuk 9y ago

That’s a rather good article. I will digest that today. I’m currently using Cypress’s PSoC line (4200M boards) for a couple of personal projects. The reconfigurable hardware and analogue parts actually kill a lot of external hardware. It’s pretty amazing and ridiculously cheap. Visual Studio is the IDE for this. https://uk.rs-online.com/mobile/p/processor-microcontroller-development-kits/1244185/ https://uk.rs-online.com/mobile/p/processor-microcontroller-... Note: don’t just jump into these if you think it’s just a better Arduino as the learning curve is extreme. You really have to know your stuff before you open the box.

joezydeco 9y ago
PSoC is an underrated line of parts. Now that they've dropped the wacky 8051-alike used in the older models and switched to ARM, there's a lot more you can do with these things.
- jason_s 9y ago
  hope the development toolchain is better than it was 6 or 7 years ago... I wanted to look into PSoC but couldn't figure out how to blink an LED after a few hours of messing around with it, so I gave up. And I'm not a beginner; I've had 22 years of microcontroller experience.
  - joezydeco 9y ago
    It's still heavily dependent on the IDE, but at least you're not bound to the compilers that were used 6 or 7 years ago. The better compiler of the two was bought by Microchip and subsequently abandoned/crippled-on-purpose for the PSoC instruction set.
05 9y ago
£8 is not even close to 'ridiculously cheap', compared to, say, Cortex-M0 STM32 boards for $1.5 with free shipping https://www.ebay.com/itm/1PCS-STM32F030F4P6-ARM-CORTEX-M0-Core-Minimum-System-Dev-Board-for-Arduino/182216811895?epid=556113683&hash=item2a6cf7e577:g:aDAAAOSwSv1Xkte~ https://www.ebay.com/itm/1PCS-STM32F030F4P6-ARM-CORTEX-M0-Co...

xt00 9y ago

Now if somebody from China can make a list of the cheap micros under 1-2 RMB, now that would be a nice list for super low cost stuff.. that I'd be very interested in...

raverbashing 9y ago
For that price I'd believe you can get only those without packaging
cjsuk 9y ago
I think you can get 8051 parts for that.
- xt00 9y ago
  Yea I'm hoping somebody can provide a list of various manufacturers and part names similar to the article..
  - jaydcarlson 9y ago
    My article includes the Holtek HT-66, the STCmicro STC8, the Nuvoton N76, and the ST STM8 — all hover in the 1-2 RMB range (especially when purchased in volume from within the mainland). The STC8 and N76 parts are 8051, the other two are their own design. The HT-66 looks very much like a PIC16 part, and IDE and compiler are totally free. The STM8 is probably the best-performing part in that price range, and has a free IDE and compiler. My review includes pretty extensive discussion on the main page, plus separate reviews for all these parts — check it out and let me know if I need to clarify anything!
    - caust1c 9y ago
      This is a great blog post but I'd also like to throw in that the STM line has a pretty great linux toolchain (official or not, I'm not sure). I made a repository for the toolchain necessary to get STM boards working here: https://github.com/abraithwaite/STM32 https://github.com/abraithwaite/STM32 Although it's outdated, the links at the bottom appear to link to updated tools which are presumably better :-)

Yaggo 9y ago

Didn't read all the author's criteria, but esp8266 is worth mentioning in the context of cheap microcontrollers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266

restricted_ptr 9y ago
Yep, enjoyed this one.
blhack 9y ago
I am falling in love with wemos's breakout boards for ESP. For instance, this one: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/WeMos-D1-ESP-Wroom-02-ESP8266-Nodemcu-WiFi-Module-With-18650-Battery-Charging/32817675179.html?ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_2_10152_10065_10151_10068_10130_10344_10345_10547_10342_10343_10546_10340_10341_10548_10545_10541_10307_10060_10155_10154_10056_10055_10539_10537_10536_10059_10534_10533_100031_10103_10102_10142_10107_10324_10325_10562_10084_10083_10561_10178_10312_10313_10314_10550_10073_10551_10552_10553_10554_10557_10558-10550,searchweb201603_1,ppcSwitch_5&btsid=e1aae482-0c4a-4b5b-9dd9-ac5cda98f697&algo_expid=8ab3d1af-a0d5-47e9-a01d-a89c2e861f08-2&algo_pvid=8ab3d1af-a0d5-47e9-a01d-a89c2e861f08 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/WeMos-D1-ESP-Wroom-02-ESP826... This is an ESP8266 breakout/programmer for about ~$3: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/ESP8266-ESP12-ESP-12-WeMos-D1-Mini-WIFI-Dev-Kit-Development-Board-NodeMCU-Lua/32653918483.html?ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_2_10152_10065_10151_10068_10130_10344_10345_10547_10342_10343_10546_10340_10341_10548_10545_10541_10307_10060_10155_10154_10056_10055_10539_10537_10536_10059_10534_10533_100031_10103_10102_10142_10107_10324_10325_10562_10084_10083_10561_10178_10312_10313_10314_10550_10073_10551_10552_10553_10554_10557_10558-10550,searchweb201603_1,ppcSwitch_5&btsid=08a29c25-5462-4269-b59f-aba059e2f7cf&algo_expid=61c40478-e028-4e04-b853-fc44623a7f9e-0&algo_pvid=61c40478-e028-4e04-b853-fc44623a7f9e https://www.aliexpress.com/item/ESP8266-ESP12-ESP-12-WeMos-D... Absolutely incredible stuff. Ordered this one coming soon: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/WEMOS-WiFi-Bluetooth-Battery-ESP32-development-tool-ESP32-battery-esp8266-ESP-WROOM-32-ESP32/32819459737.html?ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_2_10152_10065_10151_10068_10130_10344_10345_10547_10342_10343_10546_10340_10341_10548_10545_10541_10307_10060_10155_10154_10056_10055_10539_10537_10536_10059_10534_10533_100031_10103_10102_10142_10107_10324_10325_10562_10084_10083_10561_10178_10312_10313_10314_10550_10073_10551_10552_10553_10554_10557_10558,searchweb201603_1,ppcSwitch_5&btsid=6afe83b5-f204-431c-bb21-130bd4bd77e5&algo_expid=2d089ef2-2fcc-4aba-ad2d-b8a0cd3b5a6d-0&algo_pvid=2d089ef2-2fcc-4aba-ad2d-b8a0cd3b5a6d https://www.aliexpress.com/item/WEMOS-WiFi-Bluetooth-Battery... And in the realm of awesome breakouts that I'm excited for: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2pcs-TTGO-LORA-SX1278-ESP32-0-96-OLED-16-Mt-bytes-128-Mt-bit-433Mhz-for/32833821668.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2pcs-TTGO-LORA-SX1278-ESP32-... There is some really incredible stuff coming out based on the ESP8266 and ESP32 right now. IMO completely blows all of the normal arduino stuff out of the water.

alister 9y ago

If I hadn't seen this article on Hacker News today, is there any combination of plausible keywords I could have typed into Google to find this particular article if I were looking for an in-depth review of microcontrollers? I tried "best microcontrollers reviewed", "best low-cost microcontrollers", "survey of microcontrollers", and a bunch of others. Nothing that Google finds in the first 10-20 hits is as good this resource, other than Wikipedia, though very good, isn't a technical review. I suppose the lessons are: there's room for lots of improvement in search engines, or SEO really works and you better promote yourself no matter how good you are, or word of mouth (Hacker News in this case) is still the way to find the best stuff.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
> I suppose the lessons are: there's room for lots of improvement in search engines, or SEO really works and you better promote yourself no matter how good you are, or word of mouth (Hacker News in this case) is still the way to find the best stuff. The way I look at it: SEO really works, and shit sources tend to spend a lot on it, while quality sources tend to not spend anything on it at all - therefore a lot of quality stuff is hard to find, unless you can hear the right words from the right mouths. (IMO SEO, beyond making your website not look like shit, is user-hostile behaviour. It games search engines into serving users links to those who spend effort on gaming search engines instead of links to content the user was looking for.)
- blauditore 9y ago
  Indeed. SEO how it's referred to and done most of the time is almost an anti-pattern: People adjust their system (website) to implementation details of another service (search engines) instead of just fulfilling the "public contract" (exposing good, accessible content). But that's dangerous, as search engines evolve, change behavior and occasionally penalize this kind of behavior. That's why I always tried to explain to customers they should just focus on good content for humans and not care about explicit SEO after they claimed someone had told them that Google had recently "changed their algorithm" and now did XY.
  - 9y ago

0xbear 9y ago

What's really amazing is that for less than $5 nowadays you can have a 1GHz+ quad core ARM Cortex-a53 with FPU and NEON support. I mean, sure, your entire device will be more than $5, and it'll be kinda power hungry at 3W or so running full tilt, but that's a pretty beefy chip for the price of a venti Starbucks latte, capable of running full Linux, with GPU, media encode/decode, etc, etc.

hwh 9y ago
It is all a question of use case. This reply comes up all the time when I talk about how I use microcontrollers and what I use them for. For myself, microcontrollers offer me maximum control with minimum overhead. No OS, or maybe just some RTOS that does not really "boot" except for copying initial values for variables from Flash into RAM, being done in a fraction of a second. Switch it on, off it goes. Interfacing with SRAM and Flash without a driver. You can do MCU based PCB designs. It gets harder when it comes to the mentioned Cortex-A. It will be harder to sample, say, 40 pieces of them. You're very much supposed (and better off) to buy boards like OrangePi or similar. ESP designs, especially ESP32, are somewhat in between. Started off as a little documented blackbox with a RTOS interface it is now a much better (but absolutely not on par with Cortex-M designs) documented platform. However, part of it is still a proprietary code blob. They are beefy beasts, however, and when you need just that - well, it's a no-brainer. I just wish they were documented like STM32s plus ARM manuals and had a little more toolchain support. The price tag keeps me from complaining any louder. When you don't really have hard constraints and are fine with a 5 second bootup, chose whatever fits your bill. When exact timing is an issue (and you don't want to go bare metal on the Cortex-A), when fast bootup is an issue, well - better look at MCUs.
- 0xbear 9y ago
  Not gonna argue with that. I do use MCUs myself where appropriate. I like that they’re more hardware than software: flash the thing once and it will work every time from there on out. Very few moving parts, everything is very simple, power consumption is measured in milliwatts. But it still blows my mind that the equivalent (a vast superset, if you consider the GPU and specialized coprocessors) of my workstation from the late 90s now costs less than $5.

kirillkh 9y ago

Can any of these be programmed with Rust?

techdragon 9y ago
Seriously curious about this. If not these ones, what other microcontrollers have decent or better rust support? Is there a list somewhere? I'm keen to have more practical uses for my rust skills so I can enjoy using rust without having to find excuses to use it where I would be more productive with other languages.
- steveklabnik 9y ago
  Your sibling has some good links, but a decent way to think about it is, from hard to easy: * does it have an LLVM backend? * is it listed on the forge page? * is it listed as having std support? The farther you go down this list, the simpler it gets to use Rust for it. Latest work has been on ARM boards and a ton of work on AVR, which brings 8/16 but support.
dthul 9y ago
Yes! Theoretically anything that Rust has support for (https://forge.rust-lang.org/platform-support.html https://forge.rust-lang.org/platform-support.html) but I think most work has been put into ARM Cortex-M support recently. Especially Jorge Aparicio has worked to make embedded programming in Rust a joy (see https://japaric.github.io/discovery/ https://japaric.github.io/discovery/ for an introduction). If you use STM32F MCUs you will probably have the lowest friction. I've heard of other people using the NXP Kinetis lineup as well. Do mind though that there are not many peripheral libraries yet. Currently I myself am fighting with getting USB to work. Of course you could still use the vendor provided C libraries and link against them if you don't want to go for 100% Rust. The best part: You can use many of Rust's high level zero-cost abstractions. Just take a look at this example code which compiles to very efficient assembly: https://github.com/japaric/discovery/blob/116fe76491d661b5ee8b2564442f6b2787a29bf4/src/05-led-roulette/my-solution.md https://github.com/japaric/discovery/blob/116fe76491d661b5ee...

rowthri 9y ago

I tried "best microcontrollers reviewed", "best low-cost microcontrollers", "survey of microcontrollers", and a bunch of others. Nothing that Google finds in the first 10-20 hits is as good this resource, other than Wikipedia, though very good, isn't a technical review.

sgt 9y ago

["amazing", "\$1", "microcontroller"]. HN, you really know how to make me click a link within no more than 20 ms from seeing the front page.

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago

> And even if it were properly executed, I think I reject the underlying goal of this strategy. The whole purpose of using an Arduino UNO form-factor is to support Arduino shields — yet I have never seen an Arduino shield on the desk of a professional engineer or advanced hobbyist. At least, not one plugged into one of these “Uno form-factor” dev boards. I have to chime in. What's the point of using the UNO form factor if you don't support the shields, libraries or the environment? It makes completely no sense.

Hasz 9y ago
The code. The shields are pretty worthless, but the availability of libraries and example code is excellent. Instead of working out all the fine details of I2C, I can call a well developed function that takes care of all that for me. Instead of spending days writing a graphics library, I can find an off the shelf GFX library that has more features/is faster/ etc The ability to move quickly with well documented, prebuilt libraries is invaluable when you want to get something up and running ASAP. Once you're ready to develop it, then you can go back, strip out everything that's not needed, rewrite things, etc. That's the beauty of Arduino.
- Doxin 9y ago
  Hint if you're going the no-shields route: Go for the arduino pro mini. It's the same thing in a different format, and a bunch cheaper.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  The problem is that there are a lot of Arduino form-factor mainboards from other manufacturers (like the one in the article) which have no code provided. But manufacturers cargo-cult into the form factor without realizing that code is the important thing.

Steeeve 9y ago

Was it running the website?

rajini79 9y ago

good information

macrohouse 9y ago

any one can host the page on microcontroller

purplezooey 9y ago

site is down

hahamrfunnyguy 9y ago

If I am sourcing a part, I usually start with an objective comparison search on a distributors web site (https://www.mouser.com/search/Refine.aspx?N=17176544&Ns=Pricing%7c0 https://www.mouser.com/search/Refine.aspx?N=17176544&Ns=Pric...). There's even lots of sub-dollar MCUs out there too. As the author notes, picking the best one depends a lot on what you need to do.

LeifCarrotson 9y ago
There's a lot that's not covered in a parametric search listing. In your link, picking a core doesn't tell you how good the peripherals are. (Digikey's parametric search [1] does give you a lot more information about what peripherals are available where Mouser doesn't even mention it). Clock frequency doesn't tell you how many cycles the instructions take. And none of that tells me anything about power consumption or performance in a typical application, or especially about the usability of the toolchains. If answering "it depends on what you need to do" requires a lot of domain expertise to evaluate, there's definitely a place for summaries like this! [1]: https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/embedded-microcontrollers/685 https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/...

abetusk 9y ago

The most relevant part for me is this cherry picked line from the article: ... Consequently, the megaAVR remains the most open-source 8-bit microcontroller on the market — by a long shot. ... Even though the Atmel AVRs aren't the fastest, or cheapest (in cost per unit) or the toolchain isn't the easiest to use or the debugging capabilities aren't as good, the fact that it's open-source makes it win, hands down. There's a reason why nearly every hobby electronics project you see has an Arduino in it. Assuming the Arduino IDE is installed and permissions issues have been resolved, you can go from unboxing your Arduino to making it blink in under 60 seconds. In addition, places like Adafruit [1] and Sparkfun [2] build their own boards and make most of their code free/libre/open-source [3] [4], with a large focus on Arduino. It'll be interesting to see how the electronics market evolves when the current and subsequent generations are trained on AVRs. [1] https://www.adafruit.com/ https://www.adafruit.com/ [2] https://www.sparkfun.com/ https://www.sparkfun.com/ [3] https://github.com/adafruit https://github.com/adafruit [4] https://github.com/sparkfun https://github.com/sparkfun

fermienrico 9y ago
ESP8266 and ESP32 trumps AVR in every respect, including their openness.
- tomcam 9y ago
  They don’t meet the explicitly stated $1 goal
  - fermienrico 9y ago
    Understand and I am very well aware having purchased over 20k ESP32 MCUs. However, the parent comment that I responded to is talking about opensource aspects and community of AVR microcontroller to which I responded that Espressif is not only cost competitive, but it beats AVR in every aspect (perhaps you can say it's not as mature of an ecosystem).
radix07 9y ago
Open source hardware in the microcontroller world isn't quite as big of a deal as it is in the software world. While it would be great to see the processor architecture and all, I would much rather have an ARM that I know works and won't have to look at. I believe modern Arduinos are going to Cortex processors which are ARM as well, so I don't think the open source claim is what keeps Arduino hardware going. It is most likely going to be ease of use, accessibility, community and the tools.

visarga 9y ago

It's not just microcontrollers that are amazing: using a cheap phone can give you a screen, a battery, 3G and sensors.

ammu1966 9y ago

Yep, I loved this one.

jaydcarlson 9y ago

I've made some network changes, and the site should be back up for most users — let me know if anyone is running into issues!

neya 9y ago

I've had the best overall experience using an ATTINY85 [1]. It almost serves my purpose for every use case I've had in the past couple of years - Running steppers, basic home automation, wireless, etc. If you buy them in bulk, you can get it down to less than $1 per MC. [2] You can even install Arduino libs on it and the Arduino interface has quite good support for it as well. Some of my projects with it include a DSLR camera slider [3], wireless home automation (turn off lights when I'm not in the room, communicate with my air-conditioner to maintain the room temperature using IR, etc.) [1] http://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATtiny85 http://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATtiny85 [2] https://www.ebay.com/itm/5PCS-ATTINY85-20PU-IC-MCU-8BIT-8KB-FLASH-8DIP-Top-ATTINY85-/192263968340 https://www.ebay.com/itm/5PCS-ATTINY85-20PU-IC-MCU-8BIT-8KB-... [3] https://www.instagram.com/p/1AscllHDQ0/?taken-by=discovery.diary https://www.instagram.com/p/1AscllHDQ0/?taken-by=discovery.d...

kirillkh 9y ago
Do you just use development boards with these? And which ones?
- neya 9y ago
  The AT Tiny can be programmed with an Arduino Uno, which is what I used. It's pretty easy. But there are also cheaper boards specifically for the AT Tiny.
- DSMan195276 9y ago
  You don't really need a dev board for these, you can just stick them in a breadboard and go, they're already in a DIP package and don't really need any extra circuitry besides what you're going to connect them to. You can also program them using basically any other micro-controller you may have, or use a cheap USB programmer to do it, so they're pretty cheap to get started with (Though it's not exactly as user-friendly as plugging an Arduino into USB).

kristinmick21 9y ago

It's not just micro-controllers that are amazing: using a cheap phone can give you a screen, a battery, 3G & sensors. reply

pjc50 9y ago

This is a fantastic article, a thesis-length piece of work covering the subject from every possible angle. And it's all on a single page, not an ad-encumbered pagethrough like some review sites. Ecosystem is an interesting area. It seems that everyone has converged on Eclipse, which is probably better than trying to write their own environment but can still be infuriatingly clunky at times. I'm impressed with the breadth of this review and the commitment to including everything that fits in the $1 parameter - which is now quite a lot, I hadn't expected to see Cypress PSOC there.

dragontamer 9y ago

I'm not as much of an expert as the writer of this page, but this looks legit. The major $1 microcontrollers that I've worked with (Atmel series) as well as the ones that have a LOT of buzz recently (The ST STM32F0 and TI's MSP420) are all discussed and compared.

amitprayal 9y ago
You mean TI's MSP430

VLM 9y ago

No love for the PIC10 series? Perhaps too many PIC already in the review would make it look like a MicroCHIP(TM) press release. I do see some justification in that the 10F series is more of the twenty five cents class not the $1 class. Those things are strangely charming, I had a lot of fun with the now-discontinued 10F2xx series. Adjusted for inflation the 10F3xx are now cheaper than the 10F2xx were, which is cool. Its strange to drink a can of diet coke knowing it costs 3 times as much as the controller you're troubleshooting. Another novelty of small/cheap controllers is when I was playing with the defunct 10F2xx family I didn't own a meter sensitive enough to measure the current draw at 32 khz clock. I do now, but it was an expensive meter! In the old days cheap EE would wire up a capacitor and run the ckt off the cap and time how long the voltage drop took and use that to create an imaginary resistance and use the measured V and theoretical R to calculate the theoretical current. Of course my cheap meter drew more current than the microcontroller which leads to weird games like sample voltage for a second. Also leakage currents in most caps is larger than the uC current draw oh so much fun fun fun. One trick is to drive a square wave generator thru a diode to a low leakage ceramic disk cap, assuming your reset circuitry is faster than the square wave and you trust the DC response of your scope. Another thing I tried was creating a transfer function where a 100 watt lightbulb and a tiny solar panel generate say, 1 mA, so a 99.9% optical attenuator in front of the cell means 1 uA, right? Of course sleep current is a tiny fraction of that, so you stack a SECOND optical attenuator on the solar cell, say merely 99% blocking, and that should be 10 nA which is about half sleep current, right? You can also play games when your CPU costs 30 cents like hooking up 100 in parallel for $30 to measure 100x average current. Low current is fun if you're ever bored.

pjc50 9y ago
Whenever this kind of low current stuff is discussed, I like to bring up the master, Bob Pease: http://www.electronicdesign.com/test-amp-measurement/whats-all-femtoampere-stuff-anyhow http://www.electronicdesign.com/test-amp-measurement/whats-a... (also the article has reservations about PIC, pointing out its strangenesses and describing PIC24 as underwhelming)

syntaxing 9y ago

Completely off topic but does anyone know what the site is running and whether its a "theme"? I'm planning to write something technical and I am a huge fan on how the website is structured.

pjc50 9y ago
A quick look at the source suggests it's Wordpress with "TheGem" theme.
- syntaxing 9y ago
  Awesome! Thank you!

jokoon 9y ago

Well at this point all I would like to get is a USB-powered linux in a card, with wifi, optionally with a screen capable enough to display 3 or 4 lines of text. I mean raspberry is cool, cheap and everything, but I'd prefer something all integrated, as small as the raspberry pi zero, less fragile (meaning I can put in my pocket or bag, and still expect it to work), not necessarily with pins. I don't know about what the demand is for micro-controllers, but as a consumer and a developer, having a wifi-capable portable micro computer would really be cool. Does it already exist? Under $50?

ketsa 9y ago
We call those "smartphone."
joezydeco 9y ago
It's getting close. There are newer SoCs that are MMU capable and also contain enough RAM and Flash to run a small Linux instance off a single part...or a single part with some simple QSPI flash hung off of it. Renesas has the RZ line that can do this, but it will probably take up $30-$35 of your $50 budget.
iuguy 9y ago
Not quite, and for various reasons. What would you want by way of input on such a device? I've been working on something like this based on TI OMAP CPUs, and the hardest thing (after a decent semi-open SoC) is getting a decent keyboard. I think the N800 was probably the pinnacle of handheld Linux devices (or the Psion 5 series if you step outside of Linux). You could look at the Raspberry Pi handheld game console options out there, but ultimately there's little that can compete with a Pi Zero, battery pack and ILI9341 screen on price.
davandg 9y ago
I think that Linus is too heavy for a very cheap "CPU". If by Linux you mean "something easy to develop on", then most micro-controllers come nowadays with an Arduino compatible layer. If you remove the Linux part from your wishlist, you can consider some "NodeMCU" boards on Chinese websites, eg: https://www.banggood.com/Wemos-NODEMCU-ESP8266-12F-WiFi-1_30_96-Inch-OLED-BoardBottom-Plate-p-1176035.html https://www.banggood.com/Wemos-NODEMCU-ESP8266-12F-WiFi-1_30... https://www.banggood.com/Wemos-TTGO-WiFi-Bluetooth-Battery-ESP32-0_96-Inch-OLED-Development-Tool-p-1213497.html https://www.banggood.com/Wemos-TTGO-WiFi-Bluetooth-Battery-E...

j_s 9y ago

What is the minimum horsepower to build a WiFi KVM? The monitor part seems toughest; if it's possible to do so cheaply I don't care how fast it updates. I plan on trying out this $12 ESP8266-based device which ships configured as a USB serial port -- I plan on using it as a serial console. It would be awesome if I could convince it to somehow act as a USB VGA-enough and see both the boot/BIOS screens and the OS GUI. https://github.com/whid-injector/WHID https://github.com/whid-injector/WHID

jo909 9y ago
USB mouse and keyboard is already possible on ESP8266: https://github.com/cnlohr/espusb https://github.com/cnlohr/espusb As for VGA i think you are out of luck, or need a faster/specialized co-processor. VGA requires 3 analog inputs of at least ~30MHz, and an ESP8266 has one analog input in the low (I think I've seen 20) kHz range, so more than 1000 times too slow.
- j_s 9y ago
  Thanks much for taking the time to share your expertise in answering my question!
  - jo909 9y ago
    You're welcome. I looked into it because it would make a pretty cool project and while pretty advanced, not impossible. The cheapest analog-digital-converter chip I found is the TVP7002. Dealing with the digital pixel output is still way way too much data, but now it might be possible to scan the picture a few pixels each loop. The reasonable approach would be to process it in an FPGA or specialized chip and only deal with a compressed and scaled image in the ESP8266.

bhu1st 9y ago

Not in the list but I used Atmel AT89S51/52, built basic line tracking robot, pc controlled bot, relay driver, home automation etc http://www.atmel.com/images/doc1919.pdf http://www.atmel.com/images/doc1919.pdf

jventura 9y ago

Maybe is not the best topic to ask, but does anyone know good sources (websites, books, kits) for playing with and learning a bit more about microcontrollers and electronics? I would prefer structured sources (those that take newbies by hand) than unstructured ones.. I used to play a little bit with the nerdkits (http://www.nerdkits.com http://www.nerdkits.com) and really enjoyed their approach but they seem to have gone out of business and their content has not been updated for some years..

pp19dd 9y ago
One quick thing you can get into is assembling electronics kits. Granted it's not programming, design, or theory, but it's an interesting alternative that'll get you started without having to catch up on theory. All you need is the kit and a few basic tools, like a soldering iron, some tweezers and pliers. There's a person (fairly active on reddit, I believe) who put together a youtube channel reviewing such kits. Sadly he stopped posting new videos years ago (bored and moved on?) Think he's an EE or something comparable for work, but, in either case take a look at some of his offerings: https://www.youtube.com/user/SUBLOOP/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/SUBLOOP/videos The video that I got started with and caught my attention was his "Active Speakers" kit, part 2. They're entertaining, his soldering is just hypnotic, and it covered some troubleshooting you'd run into with electronics.
deeg 9y ago
adafruit.com and sparkfun.com are two of my go-tos. Pretty strong community support.
- jventura 9y ago
  Thanks for your input, I briefly checked those links and they seem to be stores and quite overwhelming in their range of products and tutorials. What I'm looking for is mostly project tutorials or books at a basic level, as in "how do I start?". For instance, the nerdkit had me build a temperature sensor from the most basic parts and display the temperature in a LCD (bundled with the kit). Any other suggestions? Edit: typos

jhallenworld 9y ago

Not the cheapest perhaps, but I recently used Ambiq's Apollo for a project. It's an ultra low power ARM MCU. I found it very nice to use mainly because Ambiq only has two models at this point, which makes their libraries very clean. The other advantage is that its I2C slave core operates autonomously- it provides a shared register space. It means that a master can write a bunch of stuff to the shared memory without waking up the CPU during each transaction (which usually involves clock stretching).

nojvek 9y ago

That website took forever to load at 100kbps. So long I cancelled and started with comments. I know this is off topic but would love HN to show a page size besides each link so we know whether the link is even worth opening.