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>I'm amateur. My point exactly, and that's fine to choose whatever you're more comfortable with for your hobby projects, but when we're talking about actually

>I'm amateur. My point exactly, and that's fine to choose whatever you're more comfortable with for your hobby projects, but when we're talking about actually developing products and shipping millions of units on tight budgets with high constraints, that need to operate flawlessly for decades in harsh environments, you'll realize why using "ye olde faithful" 30 year old AVR core, could make a lot more technical, business and financial sense than the newest shiny ARM based chips that just came out in <current_year>. So, no offense, but amateur hobby work and shipping millions of products that need to be bullet proof, are worlds apart.

speed_spread 4y ago
I've summarized your stance as "real men use C on AVR". Newer technologies such as Rust fundamentally do not solve a technical problem, but a social one. As you say, anything can already be done reliably and cheaply using existing tools and chips _provided you already know the field_. What the new tech brings in is "knowledge scalability" - one can reuse much more of their experience from non-embedded platform and focus on learning the challenges specific to the MCU environment without having to deal with the incidental complexity of low-level programming.
- eropple 4y ago
  Rust is transferable, but it's the RISC-V what-ifs that don't necessarily follow. You can run Rust or Zig on AVR.
monocasa 4y ago
> but when we're talking about actually developing products and shipping millions of units on tight budgets with high constraints, that need to operate flawlessly for decades in harsh environments, you'll realize why using "ye olde faithful" 30 year old AVR core, could make a lot more technical, business and financial sense than the newest shiny ARM based chips that just came out in <current_year>. I've found the opposite to be true being a embedded engineer. AVRs in products typically smack of the Arduino->product pipeline and don't otherwise make much sense these days in professional circles. Their BoM cost is absurd versus the other options. That's why digikey still has thousands of avrs available, but stm32fs are still in the months of lead time or qty 25 from some sketchy resellers. It's pretty hard to justify an AVR is a design review either at the ~$3 qty 1 space where you can instead have a 100mhz arm with more peripherals that might allow more consolidation of your design, or in the lower ends where there are cheaper micros when you're just babysitting one or two slow peripherals.

speed_spread 4y ago

I've summarized your stance as "real men use C on AVR". Newer technologies such as Rust fundamentally do not solve a technical problem, but a social one. As you say, anything can already be done reliably and cheaply using existing tools and chips _provided you already know the field_. What the new tech brings in is "knowledge scalability" - one can reuse much more of their experience from non-embedded platform and focus on learning the challenges specific to the MCU environment without having to deal with the incidental complexity of low-level programming.

eropple 4y ago
Rust is transferable, but it's the RISC-V what-ifs that don't necessarily follow. You can run Rust or Zig on AVR.

monocasa 4y ago

> but when we're talking about actually developing products and shipping millions of units on tight budgets with high constraints, that need to operate flawlessly for decades in harsh environments, you'll realize why using "ye olde faithful" 30 year old AVR core, could make a lot more technical, business and financial sense than the newest shiny ARM based chips that just came out in <current_year>. I've found the opposite to be true being a embedded engineer. AVRs in products typically smack of the Arduino->product pipeline and don't otherwise make much sense these days in professional circles. Their BoM cost is absurd versus the other options. That's why digikey still has thousands of avrs available, but stm32fs are still in the months of lead time or qty 25 from some sketchy resellers. It's pretty hard to justify an AVR is a design review either at the ~$3 qty 1 space where you can instead have a 100mhz arm with more peripherals that might allow more consolidation of your design, or in the lower ends where there are cheaper micros when you're just babysitting one or two slow peripherals.