7 ms·
The ATtiny 2-Series
- vardump 4y agoIs it just me, or are ATtinys surprisingly expensive chips? 55 cents for an ATtiny402 for instance. 4k Flash, 8 pins. Something to do with the chip shortage?
- matthews2 4y agoThe prices listed in the article are for buying a single chip. If you're buying in the thousands by the reel, many suppliers will sell you them for less than half the one-off price.
- twawaaay 4y agoPartly. There is a lot of people who buy these in very small quantities, myself included. Bulk purchasers pay much less. The ratio of cost of single unit when buying one and a huge amount varies wildly from chip to chip.
- ckocagil 4y agoYes, they are expensive. This is what prompted a lot of people to switch to alternatives like Padauk. They had supply issues, though :/
- coupdejarnac 4y agoAnd most of the padauk chips hobbyists bought are collecting dust.
- TreeRingCounter 4y agoWe've gotten to the point where a small 32-bit ARM core IC is cheaper than an 8-bit atmel core IC. I've stopped using 8-bit chips entirely in my designs.
- LAC-Tech 4y agoI wonder if that's because the lower power consumption of an 8 bit Atmel is now in itself a premium feature consumers think is worth paying for? Definitely useful for remote IoT nodes at the very edge, where battery life really matters.
- beardyw 4y ago> a small 32-bit ARM core IC is cheaper Can you show an example.
- jamesmunns 4y agostm32g0 parts (for example the stm32g030) can often be in the <$1 range, or <$0.50 at decent quantities. I think there is even an stm32c0 line planned at a lower price point. There are likely lower cost parts, but the REALLY cheap 32 bit parts are moving to RISC-V, see WCH's recent releases. Edit: as a specific example, the STM32G030F6P6TR is available at $0.74 for one, or $0.45/ea at qty 1000 over on JLCPCB's part list: https://jlcpcb.com/partdetail/Stmicroelectronics-STM32G030F6P6TR/C529330 https://jlcpcb.com/partdetail/Stmicroelectronics-STM32G030F6... I put some of these on a very recent project.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- LeifCarrotson 4y agoHere are ~200 examples from Digikey (sort by price->increasing at a reasonable quantity): https://www.digikey.com/short/jjhtf0h8 https://www.digikey.com/short/jjhtf0h8 These are Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M23 parts in manufacturer lines like Atmel SAMD10, Freescale KE04, Nuvoton Mini55, NXP LPC82x, Infineon PSOC4, STmicro STM32G0 and STM32F0, and others. And they often blow the 8-bit parts out of the water in features and performance, usually losing only in battery leakage current/active current consumption. Technically they're often 16/32-bit ARM Thumb cores, not sure I'd call them 32-bit cores when 90% of the instructions you'll execute are 16 bits, even though the memory space and registers are 32 bits wide. I suppose they feel close enough to developers and users like 32 bit cores as opposed to something that's painfully, obviously, only 8 or 16 bits wide that you can just ignore that technicality...
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago5V compatibility and 40mA per pin has associated costs. You won't get that in a cheap ARM device.
- LeifCarrotson 4y agoIt depends on your volume and target price. Are you trying to put a microcontroller, a battery, a couple switches, and some LEDs/speakers in an injection-molded, basically disposable, consumer good to sell through McDonalds Happy Meals, Walmart, or AliExpress, and you plan to build hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of units? Do you expect to program in assembly, or a custom subset of something C-like that obviously won't include the standard library but might not even include something as fundamental as any values on the call stack for arguments or returns, happily trading a couple weeks of developer frustration if it saves $0.01 per part? No, the ATTiny doesn't really make sense for you....find a Chinese 8051 or Paduk core you can epoxy down chip-on-board style, aiming for the absolute bare minimum of peripherals and costs. Are you producing some high-value commercial good in small quantities? Do you place a high value on developer productivity, want a generous assortment of peripherals and interrupts including communication and reasonably performant DAC and ADC onboard, a comfortable C library, a UPDI online debug interface, vendor support and thorough documentation in English? The ATTiny may be for you, or maybe you want an MSP430 or Cortex-M0, or maybe you want to spend $1 more per unit (worth 200 man-weeks of developer frustration in the paragraph above!) and get something with 10x the Flash and pin count. A good comparison of some similar microcontrollers (including the ATtiny 1-series) written in 2017 is here: https://jaycarlson.net/microcontrollers/ https://jaycarlson.net/microcontrollers/ Note that this article was specifically tailored to parts just barely under $1, and didn't focus on the very cheapest parts. HN has hosted discussion of this article some 4 times in the past 5 years, originally here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15633785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15633785
- aidenn0 4y agoLess than $0.34 in volume[1] 1: https://www.microchipdirect.com/product/ATTINY402-SSZT-VAO?productLoaded=true https://www.microchipdirect.com/product/ATTINY402-SSZT-VAO?p...
- zajio1am 4y agoWhich (comparable) ones are cheaper?
- ilyt 4y agoAtmel were always bit pricy for the featureset
- Steltek 4y agoI love the ATtiny for hobby projects! The acceptable voltage range means it can run off lithium with no regulator and then the quiescent current is something like 5nA. The battery will practically self-discharge faster than the MC can wear it out. Of course the feature set is limited but for the battery powered "go to sleep until XYZ then do something" use case, it's awesome.
- scottwick 4y agoI totally agree, they're really great for simple hobby projects! I've mostly used the ATTiny85 and it's easy to understand the datasheet, easy to program, battery efficient and comes in a DIP-8 form factor for easy breadboarding. Compared with something like an STM32 I find it quite fun to work with!
- brokenmachine 4y agoI find the ATTiny85 difficult, since you have to connect a programmer to it. I tried the Digispark clones but then you lose the low-power advantages. I'm usually trying to work out problems with my crappy code so I need a connection all the time to iterate. So I prefer the ESPs or Arduino Pro Micro.
- snvzz 4y agoAIUI, Texas Instruments' MSP430 series[0] (which are 16-bit) is still king at low power. 0. https://embedded.fm/blog/ese101?format=amp https://embedded.fm/blog/ese101?format=amp
- zokier 4y agoWhile low-power has been the selling point for MSP430, in practice I understand the shitton of effort poured into making ARM power-efficient has allowed them to surpass MSP430, see e.g. https://www.eembc.org/ulpmark/ulp-cp/scores.php https://www.eembc.org/ulpmark/ulp-cp/scores.php
- guenthert 4y agoTrue, but (some) ATtiny are still available in beginner-friendly tth DIP package.
- bitwrangler 4y agoI wonder if Arduino will support the ATtiny 2-series? UPDATED: Yes... it's at the bottom on the article. "Spence Konde has updated his excellent megaTinyCore to add support for all the ATtiny 2-series parts" The major differences that I can see: - More flash/ram, now up to 32k / 3k - This has two USART modules, not just one. - This has no DAC module, it was removed - The ADC is improved: was 10-bit 115 ksps, now 12-bit differential 375 ksps.
- snvzz 4y agoA missed opportunity to move to RISC-V. At that price (and cheaper), WCH's new chips[0] are way more competitive. 0. https://www.hackster.io/news/wch-launches-a-sub-10-risc-v-microcontroller-while-a-6-90-dev-board-gets-you-started-90b1ffd7490a https://www.hackster.io/news/wch-launches-a-sub-10-risc-v-mi...
- LeifCarrotson 4y agoMicrochip/Atmel and the ATtiny - even on the launch of a new sub-series like this - are as safe and conservative a choice as IBM or SAP. The WCH RISC-V chip is very, very high risk. I can't buy them at any of the standard distributors, and your article and the linked CNX article say: > The board is now available to order on Tindie for $6.90 > More information on the part ... is available in Chinese on the WCH website. > I got pricing information from a tweet by Patrick Yang, Technical Director of WCH, who claims that the CH32V003 RISC-V microcontroller sells for less than 10 cents. I can't go to a customer with a quotation based on a tweet. Obviously the bleeding edge of technology is more competitive in some ways, but not every product launch ought to be on that bleeding edge. I do hope that someday the big vendors launch RISC-V microcontrollers, but they all have a lot of IP in their preexisting ecosystems.
- 95014_refugee 4y agoRV32E seems dead in the water - no value, no movement, no uptake. RV32I* is ... a dumpster fire, and I say this as someone helping shepherd both silicon specification and reusable software components for it. Really basic things like "how interrupts should work" seem to be a matter of personal taste (and the specs are ... awful, like RFC-by-undergrad awful). By contrast, and for all its faults, AVR is well-defined and stable. This removes a substantial amount of risk from a customer perspective. Once you have attained a basic level of competence in delivering something on AVR (and most major players did this 20 years ago) you can repeat this in a relatively predictable, consistent and low-risk fashion. The same cannot be said of RV32I*, where every new implementation has to be treated as a from-scratch bringup. Consider the (relative non-)success of AVR32. Not a strict 1:1, but it brought very little to the table in terms of relevance to 8-bit AVR customers, and added a bunch of risk and overhead. Obviously there are customers for which COGS is king, and they won't be buying AVR. Ditto those where engineering technofetishism is a consideration (gotta motivate your devs, and if new toys are what does it, then you have to factor it into your plans). But there are (clearly, since they keep making money with the product line) others for whom AVR's strengths make good sense. Switching from AVR to RV32I* would destroy the product line from that perspective. Which is probably not the "opportunity" you were thinking of. 8) [edit: fix use of *]
- nerpderp82 4y agoMetacomment, the information density and layout of this page is excellent!