4 ms·

OTOH things which belong on microcontrollers are now being pushed back to microcontrollers for cost reasons, so there is a win to be found there.

teaearlgraycold 7mo ago
I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Pi Pico 2W. It can host an access point, a web server, be a USB host, and of course has GPIO. And not running an OS means it’s way simpler.
chromacity 7mo ago
Even before the hikes, SBCs were $50-$100 a pop, compared to pennies for basic MCUs and maybe $4 for high-performance ones. People were clearly willing to pay 100x more just for familiarity and the ecosystem ("hats", forums, etc). I don't know if 300x is going to make more hobbyists see the light, or just result in fewer of them being able to afford the hobby?
- charcircuit 7mo ago
  That's an apples to oranges comparison. Might as well bring up how people pay thousands of dollars for FPGA boards.
  - chromacity 7mo ago
    No. Many hobbyists default to SBCs whether they need them or not. No one defaults to FPGA if they don't need it.
    - charcircuit 7mo ago
      My point is that the FPGA boards are several orders of magnitude more expensive than the actual chip. To be fair you should be comparing between the cost of the SoC and the microcontroller.
- KPGv2 7mo ago
  > People were clearly willing to pay 100x more just for familiarity and the ecosystem This is obviously logical. If I know how to program in Python or JS but not C and am familiar with SSH, I can do something with a SBC in a few minutes. I get paid $200/hr. If I spent even one hour to learn what I need to deal with a microcontroller, the time cost is four times the cost of materials if I stick with what I know. How many small projects do I need to do in my free time before it's financially smart to learn a whole new technology?
  - telotortium 7mo ago
    With LLMs, it's potentially a lot easier to use microcontrollers now, depending on how widely available the documentation is now.
  - j1elo 7mo ago
    As if it would make sense that spending 2hrs relaxing on the beach or gardening your orchids would cost $400 to you. Money not made is not money spent. If you were doing a hobby project for learning, you were not going to be working during that time anyways, so your hourly rate doesn't matter.
  - rob74 7mo ago
    Microcontrollers don't really make sense for hobbyists (unless their hobby is programming microcontrollers, of course). They only make sense when you think about deploying an application at scale, at which point the per-unit price becomes important. OTOH, if your hobby project goes viral and you want to profit from selling SBCs with it preinstalled, a cheaper SBC is a plus, but that's not very likely to happen...
  - extraduder_ire 7mo ago
    Most of the "professional" microcontrollers have complicated flashing schemes, expensive bespoke IDEs, and limited language support. Treating a lot of that like a moat around their products. I find it remarkable that they haven't tried to make all of that easier. Any board with arduino support is easy to start using, with pared down c++, boards similar to the micro:bit support micropython and javascript as well as a few others, and a ton of modern development boards have UF2 support. UF2 is a step change in how easy it is to flash a binary onto a microcontroller. You hold down a button before connecting it to a USB port, and then it appears as a USB drive for you to drop a file onto, once it's done "copying" the board is flashed and will run your code as soon as it resets. If you want to gain familiarity with a board, you can drop a .uf2 file with a REPL on it and run code on the board a line at a time.
JKCalhoun 7mo ago
Yeah, never understood why I would want an entire OS running just to blink an LED. I was going to make a pro-Arduino comment but I guess my LED example warrants little more than an R/C circuit and a transistor, ha ha. (Anyway, I still remember the thrill of writing assembly for a 68HC11 and getting a pair of hobby servos to respond.)
- bombcar 7mo ago
  Familiarity - it’s easy for us Linux dweebs to build a pi that can flip an LED, but programming an arduino is an entire new area.
  - jfim 7mo ago
    It's pretty trivial to do so on Arduino though. void setup() { pinMode(LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT); } void loop() { digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, HIGH); delay(1000); digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW); delay(1000); }
    - KPGv2 7mo ago
      Well first you have to learn the Arduino programming language. And the stdlib.
      - telotortium 7mo ago
        Good thing LLMs exist now
      - grogenaut 7mo ago
        it's literally the hello world of micros. get an arduino, plug it into the usb, install the ide, new -> example -> 01. Blink. Press Run. Cool you have now blunk a led. Now use AI to draw the rest of the owl.
        bombcar 7mo ago
randusername 7mo ago
Agree, but there was something special about SBCs being so cheap they were the default recommendation for new hobbyists and I'm sad to see that go. I would not have fallen in love with microcontrollers without Raspberry Pi and PocketCHIP as stepping stones. The messaging of "it's a tiny computer, make whatever you want with it" is so much more approachable than anything I've found on the microcontroller side. Even Arduino. I dismissed it for a long time because I misunderstood it. I thought I had to buy Arduino devices, then Arduino shields, then program them in the Arduino language using the Arduino IDE.

teaearlgraycold 7mo ago

I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Pi Pico 2W. It can host an access point, a web server, be a USB host, and of course has GPIO. And not running an OS means it’s way simpler.

chromacity 7mo ago

Even before the hikes, SBCs were $50-$100 a pop, compared to pennies for basic MCUs and maybe $4 for high-performance ones. People were clearly willing to pay 100x more just for familiarity and the ecosystem ("hats", forums, etc). I don't know if 300x is going to make more hobbyists see the light, or just result in fewer of them being able to afford the hobby?

charcircuit 7mo ago
That's an apples to oranges comparison. Might as well bring up how people pay thousands of dollars for FPGA boards.
- chromacity 7mo ago
  No. Many hobbyists default to SBCs whether they need them or not. No one defaults to FPGA if they don't need it.
  - charcircuit 7mo ago
    My point is that the FPGA boards are several orders of magnitude more expensive than the actual chip. To be fair you should be comparing between the cost of the SoC and the microcontroller.
KPGv2 7mo ago
> People were clearly willing to pay 100x more just for familiarity and the ecosystem This is obviously logical. If I know how to program in Python or JS but not C and am familiar with SSH, I can do something with a SBC in a few minutes. I get paid $200/hr. If I spent even one hour to learn what I need to deal with a microcontroller, the time cost is four times the cost of materials if I stick with what I know. How many small projects do I need to do in my free time before it's financially smart to learn a whole new technology?
- telotortium 7mo ago
  With LLMs, it's potentially a lot easier to use microcontrollers now, depending on how widely available the documentation is now.
- j1elo 7mo ago
  As if it would make sense that spending 2hrs relaxing on the beach or gardening your orchids would cost $400 to you. Money not made is not money spent. If you were doing a hobby project for learning, you were not going to be working during that time anyways, so your hourly rate doesn't matter.
- rob74 7mo ago
  Microcontrollers don't really make sense for hobbyists (unless their hobby is programming microcontrollers, of course). They only make sense when you think about deploying an application at scale, at which point the per-unit price becomes important. OTOH, if your hobby project goes viral and you want to profit from selling SBCs with it preinstalled, a cheaper SBC is a plus, but that's not very likely to happen...
- extraduder_ire 7mo ago
  Most of the "professional" microcontrollers have complicated flashing schemes, expensive bespoke IDEs, and limited language support. Treating a lot of that like a moat around their products. I find it remarkable that they haven't tried to make all of that easier. Any board with arduino support is easy to start using, with pared down c++, boards similar to the micro:bit support micropython and javascript as well as a few others, and a ton of modern development boards have UF2 support. UF2 is a step change in how easy it is to flash a binary onto a microcontroller. You hold down a button before connecting it to a USB port, and then it appears as a USB drive for you to drop a file onto, once it's done "copying" the board is flashed and will run your code as soon as it resets. If you want to gain familiarity with a board, you can drop a .uf2 file with a REPL on it and run code on the board a line at a time.

JKCalhoun 7mo ago

Yeah, never understood why I would want an entire OS running just to blink an LED. I was going to make a pro-Arduino comment but I guess my LED example warrants little more than an R/C circuit and a transistor, ha ha. (Anyway, I still remember the thrill of writing assembly for a 68HC11 and getting a pair of hobby servos to respond.)

bombcar 7mo ago
Familiarity - it’s easy for us Linux dweebs to build a pi that can flip an LED, but programming an arduino is an entire new area.
- jfim 7mo ago
  It's pretty trivial to do so on Arduino though. void setup() { pinMode(LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT); } void loop() { digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, HIGH); delay(1000); digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW); delay(1000); }
  - KPGv2 7mo ago
    Well first you have to learn the Arduino programming language. And the stdlib.
    - telotortium 7mo ago
      Good thing LLMs exist now
    - grogenaut 7mo ago
      it's literally the hello world of micros. get an arduino, plug it into the usb, install the ide, new -> example -> 01. Blink. Press Run. Cool you have now blunk a led. Now use AI to draw the rest of the owl.
      - bombcar 7mo ago

randusername 7mo ago

Agree, but there was something special about SBCs being so cheap they were the default recommendation for new hobbyists and I'm sad to see that go. I would not have fallen in love with microcontrollers without Raspberry Pi and PocketCHIP as stepping stones. The messaging of "it's a tiny computer, make whatever you want with it" is so much more approachable than anything I've found on the microcontroller side. Even Arduino. I dismissed it for a long time because I misunderstood it. I thought I had to buy Arduino devices, then Arduino shields, then program them in the Arduino language using the Arduino IDE.