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This article is great, but misses the mark by focusing on this arbitrary $1 price point. For a hobbyist, a dollar or ten is all the same. These very cheap chips

This article is great, but misses the mark by focusing on this arbitrary $1 price point. For a hobbyist, a dollar or ten is all the same. These very cheap chips are intended for high volume applications, far from the realm of DIY. If you’re doing a hobby project, take something off the top of the line. Having all those peripherals and compute power is just one thing less to worry about.

ethbr0 6y ago
Limit resource to Sweep mental complexities Away, like fall's leaves.
- polishdude20 6y ago
  Beautiful
nightfly 6y ago
> For a hobbyist, a dollar or ten is all the same. Not really. If I manage to burn it out that $10 MCU just became a $20 MCU. And if I want it to run off a battery, extra peripherals and compute power I don't need don't help me any. And if I want to make more than one I want to to be cheap.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
  Yup. I burned out 3 NodeMCU boards in one day because I apparently know nothing about circuits (especially transistors) and kept effectively shorting a digital IO pin to ground. Two of them appear to have blown voltage regulators. If I plug them into USB, the 3.3v pins give 0.25v on one board and 1.0v on the other. The third one appears to work fine, but I can't get it to accept flashes reliably. At least 90% of the time, it can't even open the COM port to flash (Says the device is busy). When it DOES actually flash, in the end it will often throw an error saying there was a hash mismatch, indicating the firmware was corrupted during the flashing process. I have had once or twice where it flashed with no errors, but my code appears to fail to run. It's not like I'm gonna really notice the $13 I'm spending on Amazon to replace the boards (I know I can get them cheaper on AliExpress or some other Chinese site, but I wanted them in two days, not four weeks), but still I hate spending money I don't have to.
kumarvvr 6y ago
True. But if you are a hobbyist, at the cusp of commercialization, then the MCU cost is a huge factor in total product cost. As an example, I made a flow measurement and alarm system for my home. I used an ESP8266 development board, which is damn cheap, at about 5 USD. I successfully completed the project. However, I decided to explore options for commercialization, and that 5 USD became a huge cost increase for my overall system. So I am now trying to designin systems with MCUs that are less than 30 cents.
- abiogenesis 6y ago
  It is true that ESP8266 chips are slightly more expensive than 30 cents, but I believe you were not planning to use the development board for mass production.
  - kumarvvr 6y ago
    You missed my point. For a commercial product, even 1 USD MCU can be a significant cost addition.
    - abiogenesis 6y ago
      My comment was a reaction to the following statement. It is true that you should absolutely use the cheapest MCU ignoring the development cost if you are targeting to manufacture millions of those: > and that 5 USD became a huge cost increase for my overall system.
embedawayz 6y ago
Eh, sometimes it's nice to have a go-to workhorse that you can throw into almost anything. The STM32F103C8 is a good example. If you buy a few dozen off of AliExpress or TaoBao, "blue pill" boards containing them and a microUSB connector cost less than $3 each. They only run at 72MHz, and they don't have floating-point hardware, but the price point means that you can give them away without a second thought. When someone has an idea for a Halloween decoration, or a garden sensor, or a proof-of-concept, it's usually my first choice because it costs less than a coffee. Once it stops getting rained on, and corroded, and coated in dust, and submerged, and fried by a squirrel who thought wires were edible...then you can reach for the top of the line.
- childintime 6y ago
  Very nice, yes, but unfortunately they have a MCU clone in them, so don't count on using them with ST tools.

ethbr0 6y ago

Limit resource to Sweep mental complexities Away, like fall's leaves.

polishdude20 6y ago
Beautiful

nightfly 6y ago

> For a hobbyist, a dollar or ten is all the same. Not really. If I manage to burn it out that $10 MCU just became a $20 MCU. And if I want it to run off a battery, extra peripherals and compute power I don't need don't help me any. And if I want to make more than one I want to to be cheap.

Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
Yup. I burned out 3 NodeMCU boards in one day because I apparently know nothing about circuits (especially transistors) and kept effectively shorting a digital IO pin to ground. Two of them appear to have blown voltage regulators. If I plug them into USB, the 3.3v pins give 0.25v on one board and 1.0v on the other. The third one appears to work fine, but I can't get it to accept flashes reliably. At least 90% of the time, it can't even open the COM port to flash (Says the device is busy). When it DOES actually flash, in the end it will often throw an error saying there was a hash mismatch, indicating the firmware was corrupted during the flashing process. I have had once or twice where it flashed with no errors, but my code appears to fail to run. It's not like I'm gonna really notice the $13 I'm spending on Amazon to replace the boards (I know I can get them cheaper on AliExpress or some other Chinese site, but I wanted them in two days, not four weeks), but still I hate spending money I don't have to.

kumarvvr 6y ago

True. But if you are a hobbyist, at the cusp of commercialization, then the MCU cost is a huge factor in total product cost. As an example, I made a flow measurement and alarm system for my home. I used an ESP8266 development board, which is damn cheap, at about 5 USD. I successfully completed the project. However, I decided to explore options for commercialization, and that 5 USD became a huge cost increase for my overall system. So I am now trying to designin systems with MCUs that are less than 30 cents.

abiogenesis 6y ago
It is true that ESP8266 chips are slightly more expensive than 30 cents, but I believe you were not planning to use the development board for mass production.
- kumarvvr 6y ago
  You missed my point. For a commercial product, even 1 USD MCU can be a significant cost addition.
  - abiogenesis 6y ago
    My comment was a reaction to the following statement. It is true that you should absolutely use the cheapest MCU ignoring the development cost if you are targeting to manufacture millions of those: > and that 5 USD became a huge cost increase for my overall system.

embedawayz 6y ago

Eh, sometimes it's nice to have a go-to workhorse that you can throw into almost anything. The STM32F103C8 is a good example. If you buy a few dozen off of AliExpress or TaoBao, "blue pill" boards containing them and a microUSB connector cost less than $3 each. They only run at 72MHz, and they don't have floating-point hardware, but the price point means that you can give them away without a second thought. When someone has an idea for a Halloween decoration, or a garden sensor, or a proof-of-concept, it's usually my first choice because it costs less than a coffee. Once it stops getting rained on, and corroded, and coated in dust, and submerged, and fried by a squirrel who thought wires were edible...then you can reach for the top of the line.

childintime 6y ago
Very nice, yes, but unfortunately they have a MCU clone in them, so don't count on using them with ST tools.