7 ms·

I'm not sure why people try and go for the cheapest microcontroller. These things all have unit prices in the single digit dollars or less in actual production

I'm not sure why people try and go for the cheapest microcontroller. These things all have unit prices in the single digit dollars or less in actual production costs. Finding a cheap microcontroller is entirely about finding a cheap reseller of whatever you're trying to get rather than finding a cheap part specifically. Only when you get to truly large volumes such that you can get volume discounts does unit price really start to matter. Especially if you're a hobbyist, price should just basically not be a factor in what you're choosing as they're all in the same ballpark from resellers.

kken 4y ago
I think the main appeal is to work with small devices that have well defined resources. Just consider the popularity of the ATtiny85. However, low end 32bit devices are also available from reputed suppliers. In fact, STM just announced the STM32C* series which is also aimed at replacing 8 bit controllers. The cost benefit may only be true for low numbers and when sourcing from distributors. I am fairly certain that the price advantage is much less when talking about actual production volumes *https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32c0x1.html https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32...
- TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  Can I buy STM32 in some decent numbers, or are they still made out of unobtanium?
  - mastax 4y ago
    Generally the newer STM32s are easier to find because, I assume, they aren't being snatched up by the billions to make designs that were finalized well before these chips were released. I didn't have trouble finding STM32G0 during the height of the shortages.
  - DiabloD3 4y ago
    This is the problem when building around a specific part, no matter how cheap. The hobbyist community has selected certain daughter boards to clone, and then place SoCs on them that can run Linux (or any other hobbyist OS). If one SoC vanishes from the market, you can drop another one in, and often with zero changes to your design, keep going.
    - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
      Sometimes you just don't want to run full stack OS on a chip to switch relays, while consuming 10 times more energy than running FreeRTOS on MCU.
quanto 4y ago
I get what you are saying. For a typical hobbyist with a project or two, a few-cent (or even few-dollar) saving will most likely not make an economic difference. However, there are other aspects: 1. Golf. Just like code golf, running some task in the least resources possible (price, memory space, PCB space, flops) is a fun challenge in and of itself. 2. Professional. Some of us do (or used to) have a career in hardware/firmware engineering where the cent-level cost or millimeter-level space actually matters. And it affects how we look at hardware components. 3. General fascination at how far the technology has come along.
LoveMortuus 4y ago
As a person who's financial weak, I always go with the cheapest option that I can find, especially if this is my entrance ticket into the specific space. Yes, the cheapest option will probably have more issues then the more expensive one. But that's actually good, because if I can't deal with them, I probably would give up with a more expensive one. And this also allows me to experience what really matters to me and what I don't care about, so that if I decide to upgrade I can be much more specific on regards to what I need and what I don't need. About a year ago I entered the space of microscopy, I was lucky enough to be able to get an old one for free from the university, one that they've deemed no longer suitable for the students (probably because it doesn't have a light), but for me it is perfect, it does everything that I need it for. As for the light, I just use an LED or phones flash. Zero cost entry, and honestly I don't really feel the need to upgrade, I did buy an additional lense that comes with a holder for a phone so that I can view the slides on the phone's display and even record them! My philosophy is that you should spend as little money as possible to enter a hobby. Or in other words, don't buy tools to do a hobby. Do a hobby to buy the tools.
- xmprt 4y ago
  It's a good philosophy to have although I think the parent commenter was referring to microcontrollers specifically. You're better off getting a decently capable one for a little more than trying to make do with the cheapest version because the difference in cost is probably a few cents and the variance between resellers will be higher than that.
- mlindner 4y ago
  Sure but does your financial situation change if you pay 10¢ for your microprocessor versus paying $5 for your microprocessor?
  - imtringued 4y ago
    One of those can be spun into a product, the other one can't.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
leoedin 4y ago
Even if you're not a hobbyist, development costs will dwarf BOM costs until volumes are in the 10s of thousands - saving even a dollar per item isn't worth it if you add a few months of development time due to obscure tooling or silicon bugs.
- RealityVoid 4y ago
  It makes sense if you have volumes in the millions.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Saving a dollar per chip(what is an item?) is going to add up to 10s of dollars per unit. I am confused. I get what you mean regarding development costs. The cost of putting a bunch of popular/well supported components on a custom PCB is way too high. Just like the market for glue languages like python is big in the software industry I think the market for glue design tools is big in the electrical engineering industry. If you can cut the cost of development down by 50%, the number of projects that are worth doing goes up by more than 100%. Each individual project might be less important than the next but since the cost is low it is worth it.
TickleSteve 4y ago
embedded systems can often be made in their millions. At those numbers, costs matter. This is why design choices in embedded systems are often unusual.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
It's not even the price that's an issue for me, it's the breadth of the ecosystem. Something like the Teensy (just as an example) leverages the entire Arduino ecosystem from IDE to libraries — never mind community support in terms of forums, blogs, etc.
detrites 4y ago
A few potential reasons: I could imagine working in the industry professionally, it might become just as second nature to bean-count parts cost as say, to optimise compiled code size as a result of typically constrained memory environments. Hobbyists who don't work in the industry, may yet aspire to in the future. So, would therefore be wise to develop that ethos, or - who knows - maybe that hobby project could later become something produced in high volumes? Why needlessly limit a design, when designing something from scratch? It's rewarding to go for optimum goals. It'd be rewarding to aim to design an "optimum cost" system just as it would be for any other optimums one might target.
Roark66 4y ago
One of big problems today is availability. Even if other microcontrollers do cost single dollars (which isn't often a case, some for example stm32 chips that were cheap are now going for $40 they're so rare). If you're paying $0.1 per unit you can buy a hundred (or more) for a lifetime supply if they meet your requirements.
Karliss 4y ago
Here are a couple of factors. * As other mentioned just like code golfing, minimizing size, cost, resource usage can be valid ways to make hobby project more interesting. I remember having a lot of fun during high school trying to squeeze in code for the project into micro with 1k memory and the whole device into matchbox. * Not everyone is a silicon valley programmer with 100k salary. While cost of food and other living expenses is mostly also lower in the rest of world, the relative cost of various electronic gadgets and other things for hobbies is a lot more fixed. And with 50x price difference even at small quantities, you will always find some part of world where one side is affordable, but other side if not expensive then at least something that's not cheap anymore and you wouldn't want to waste too many times. * When you make are hobby project you don't just buy single piece of each component. You buy at least 2-3 in case you mess up, so that you can try again. Especially for highschooler or student difference between $0.13 and $35=$15 can difference between something that is still throwaway and something you would think twice whether you are getting the right thing. Add 2-3 iterations and that $15 becomes $45. * Just because it's a hobby project doesn't mean it contains single submodule. If you are making a grid of modular things, having a matrix of 10x10 is still cheap with a 0.1 micro, but 500$ is already serious money for a hobby project. You don't need to be mass manufacturing for 50x price difference to matter. Having a small cheap option, opens opportunity for new kind of projects. * Some people mentioned the time cost of time factor, and that 5$ difference isn't worth it means spending more time. I disagree. The fact that you are doing a hardware hobby project already means that you are wasting time. If you only cared about end result in many cases it would be more efficient to just buy off the shelf product. In many cases the whole point of hobby is to waste time in enjoyable way and it doesn't matter if project is finished in 1 week or 2. And if you can learn more, by solving interesting problems during a process, doing things the hard way is a benefit not a downside. * A lot of projects could be made even simpler and cheaper (if you take into account cost of development time). If you instead of replacing 0.1$ micro with 5$, replaced whole thing with 100 line python script running on a computer with screen. You can make a lot more impressive visual things on a computer, than blinky LED widgets. But it's so easy it's not fun anymore (there are plenty of fun with computer graphics but it's a completely different kind of thing). Similar thing with people messing with pen plotters. Just pressing print on inkjet printer will produce much better results much faster. People are still making their own CPUs from relays, transistors or logic blocks in computer games, even though * People have different interests and they can find different aspects of process enjoyable. interesting. It can even vary between projects what challenges the person wants to focus on, and which ones they choose to skip by spending more money.
numpad0 4y ago
If I could throw a dozen $0.50 microcontroller boards at a project instead of trying to optimize on ATmega32U4, that could remove some barriers for some projects, e.g. VR Lighthouse tracking. Indeed it isn't a huge issue at quantity of exactly one per project/device.
hakfoo 4y ago
I wonder if some of it is a reaction to "growing out of" the narrow AVR ecosystem. When you have a billion options, it's neat to pick something percieved better "because I can" I have a project that uses the now-deprecated (officially sold through, but you can find an awful lot of them of questionable authenticity on Aliexpress) Teensy++. The Teensy++ was always expensive for what you got ($24 for an AT90USB1286), but now you can get ARM and RISC-V boards with comparable or more RAM, flash, and GPIO counts, while bumping from an 8-bit 16MHz CPU to a 32-bit 100+MHz CPU, and still pay less money. I've been fiddling with the nanoCH32V305 just because, at $6 per unit, I could put aside a fair stock of boards if I decide in a few years I want to build more of the project.

kken 4y ago

I think the main appeal is to work with small devices that have well defined resources. Just consider the popularity of the ATtiny85. However, low end 32bit devices are also available from reputed suppliers. In fact, STM just announced the STM32C* series which is also aimed at replacing 8 bit controllers. The cost benefit may only be true for low numbers and when sourcing from distributors. I am fairly certain that the price advantage is much less when talking about actual production volumes *https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32c0x1.html https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32...

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
Can I buy STM32 in some decent numbers, or are they still made out of unobtanium?
- mastax 4y ago
  Generally the newer STM32s are easier to find because, I assume, they aren't being snatched up by the billions to make designs that were finalized well before these chips were released. I didn't have trouble finding STM32G0 during the height of the shortages.
- DiabloD3 4y ago
  This is the problem when building around a specific part, no matter how cheap. The hobbyist community has selected certain daughter boards to clone, and then place SoCs on them that can run Linux (or any other hobbyist OS). If one SoC vanishes from the market, you can drop another one in, and often with zero changes to your design, keep going.
  - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    Sometimes you just don't want to run full stack OS on a chip to switch relays, while consuming 10 times more energy than running FreeRTOS on MCU.

quanto 4y ago

I get what you are saying. For a typical hobbyist with a project or two, a few-cent (or even few-dollar) saving will most likely not make an economic difference. However, there are other aspects: 1. Golf. Just like code golf, running some task in the least resources possible (price, memory space, PCB space, flops) is a fun challenge in and of itself. 2. Professional. Some of us do (or used to) have a career in hardware/firmware engineering where the cent-level cost or millimeter-level space actually matters. And it affects how we look at hardware components. 3. General fascination at how far the technology has come along.

LoveMortuus 4y ago

As a person who's financial weak, I always go with the cheapest option that I can find, especially if this is my entrance ticket into the specific space. Yes, the cheapest option will probably have more issues then the more expensive one. But that's actually good, because if I can't deal with them, I probably would give up with a more expensive one. And this also allows me to experience what really matters to me and what I don't care about, so that if I decide to upgrade I can be much more specific on regards to what I need and what I don't need. About a year ago I entered the space of microscopy, I was lucky enough to be able to get an old one for free from the university, one that they've deemed no longer suitable for the students (probably because it doesn't have a light), but for me it is perfect, it does everything that I need it for. As for the light, I just use an LED or phones flash. Zero cost entry, and honestly I don't really feel the need to upgrade, I did buy an additional lense that comes with a holder for a phone so that I can view the slides on the phone's display and even record them! My philosophy is that you should spend as little money as possible to enter a hobby. Or in other words, don't buy tools to do a hobby. Do a hobby to buy the tools.

xmprt 4y ago
It's a good philosophy to have although I think the parent commenter was referring to microcontrollers specifically. You're better off getting a decently capable one for a little more than trying to make do with the cheapest version because the difference in cost is probably a few cents and the variance between resellers will be higher than that.
mlindner 4y ago
Sure but does your financial situation change if you pay 10¢ for your microprocessor versus paying $5 for your microprocessor?
- imtringued 4y ago
  One of those can be spun into a product, the other one can't.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago

leoedin 4y ago

Even if you're not a hobbyist, development costs will dwarf BOM costs until volumes are in the 10s of thousands - saving even a dollar per item isn't worth it if you add a few months of development time due to obscure tooling or silicon bugs.

RealityVoid 4y ago
It makes sense if you have volumes in the millions.
imtringued 4y ago
Saving a dollar per chip(what is an item?) is going to add up to 10s of dollars per unit. I am confused. I get what you mean regarding development costs. The cost of putting a bunch of popular/well supported components on a custom PCB is way too high. Just like the market for glue languages like python is big in the software industry I think the market for glue design tools is big in the electrical engineering industry. If you can cut the cost of development down by 50%, the number of projects that are worth doing goes up by more than 100%. Each individual project might be less important than the next but since the cost is low it is worth it.

TickleSteve 4y ago

embedded systems can often be made in their millions. At those numbers, costs matter. This is why design choices in embedded systems are often unusual.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

It's not even the price that's an issue for me, it's the breadth of the ecosystem. Something like the Teensy (just as an example) leverages the entire Arduino ecosystem from IDE to libraries — never mind community support in terms of forums, blogs, etc.

detrites 4y ago

A few potential reasons: I could imagine working in the industry professionally, it might become just as second nature to bean-count parts cost as say, to optimise compiled code size as a result of typically constrained memory environments. Hobbyists who don't work in the industry, may yet aspire to in the future. So, would therefore be wise to develop that ethos, or - who knows - maybe that hobby project could later become something produced in high volumes? Why needlessly limit a design, when designing something from scratch? It's rewarding to go for optimum goals. It'd be rewarding to aim to design an "optimum cost" system just as it would be for any other optimums one might target.

Roark66 4y ago

One of big problems today is availability. Even if other microcontrollers do cost single dollars (which isn't often a case, some for example stm32 chips that were cheap are now going for $40 they're so rare). If you're paying $0.1 per unit you can buy a hundred (or more) for a lifetime supply if they meet your requirements.

Karliss 4y ago

Here are a couple of factors. * As other mentioned just like code golfing, minimizing size, cost, resource usage can be valid ways to make hobby project more interesting. I remember having a lot of fun during high school trying to squeeze in code for the project into micro with 1k memory and the whole device into matchbox. * Not everyone is a silicon valley programmer with 100k salary. While cost of food and other living expenses is mostly also lower in the rest of world, the relative cost of various electronic gadgets and other things for hobbies is a lot more fixed. And with 50x price difference even at small quantities, you will always find some part of world where one side is affordable, but other side if not expensive then at least something that's not cheap anymore and you wouldn't want to waste too many times. * When you make are hobby project you don't just buy single piece of each component. You buy at least 2-3 in case you mess up, so that you can try again. Especially for highschooler or student difference between $0.13 and $35=$15 can difference between something that is still throwaway and something you would think twice whether you are getting the right thing. Add 2-3 iterations and that $15 becomes $45. * Just because it's a hobby project doesn't mean it contains single submodule. If you are making a grid of modular things, having a matrix of 10x10 is still cheap with a 0.1 micro, but 500$ is already serious money for a hobby project. You don't need to be mass manufacturing for 50x price difference to matter. Having a small cheap option, opens opportunity for new kind of projects. * Some people mentioned the time cost of time factor, and that 5$ difference isn't worth it means spending more time. I disagree. The fact that you are doing a hardware hobby project already means that you are wasting time. If you only cared about end result in many cases it would be more efficient to just buy off the shelf product. In many cases the whole point of hobby is to waste time in enjoyable way and it doesn't matter if project is finished in 1 week or 2. And if you can learn more, by solving interesting problems during a process, doing things the hard way is a benefit not a downside. * A lot of projects could be made even simpler and cheaper (if you take into account cost of development time). If you instead of replacing 0.1$ micro with 5$, replaced whole thing with 100 line python script running on a computer with screen. You can make a lot more impressive visual things on a computer, than blinky LED widgets. But it's so easy it's not fun anymore (there are plenty of fun with computer graphics but it's a completely different kind of thing). Similar thing with people messing with pen plotters. Just pressing print on inkjet printer will produce much better results much faster. People are still making their own CPUs from relays, transistors or logic blocks in computer games, even though * People have different interests and they can find different aspects of process enjoyable. interesting. It can even vary between projects what challenges the person wants to focus on, and which ones they choose to skip by spending more money.

numpad0 4y ago

If I could throw a dozen $0.50 microcontroller boards at a project instead of trying to optimize on ATmega32U4, that could remove some barriers for some projects, e.g. VR Lighthouse tracking. Indeed it isn't a huge issue at quantity of exactly one per project/device.

hakfoo 4y ago

I wonder if some of it is a reaction to "growing out of" the narrow AVR ecosystem. When you have a billion options, it's neat to pick something percieved better "because I can" I have a project that uses the now-deprecated (officially sold through, but you can find an awful lot of them of questionable authenticity on Aliexpress) Teensy++. The Teensy++ was always expensive for what you got ($24 for an AT90USB1286), but now you can get ARM and RISC-V boards with comparable or more RAM, flash, and GPIO counts, while bumping from an 8-bit 16MHz CPU to a 32-bit 100+MHz CPU, and still pay less money. I've been fiddling with the nanoCH32V305 just because, at $6 per unit, I could put aside a fair stock of boards if I decide in a few years I want to build more of the project.