8 ms·

Arduino TRE

79 points by x43b 12y ago

emranemran 12y ago
Wasn't this board announced a while back?
- kasbah 12y ago
  Yes, ages ago.
mayoff 12y ago
What is the advantage of this over a Raspberry Pi?
- damian2000 12y ago
  Two I can think of ... it includes a low cost Atmel microcontroller so it can be used for prototyping low cost/low power usage applications, in the same way as the original Arduino. Its compatible with Arduino shields.
- Fradow 12y ago
  There are several advantages: - both 5V and 3.3V logic, meaning you can use pretty much any part without level shifters - analog inputs (which are really lacking on Raspberry Pi if you want to use sensors) - 4 USB host ports (only the Pi 2 has as much) - the simplicity of Arduino for electronics, coupled with a Linux for other tasks On the other hand, I expect it to be more expensive, and probably less powerfull than a Raspberry Pi. It is definitely aimed to big electronics project that requires both a lot of GPIO and a full-fledged OS, for which you would formerly use a board running Linux + an Arduino
  - aselzer 12y ago
    also: 7 hardware PWM outputs (the Pi has one)
    - iwwr 12y ago
      You can sort-of do analog input-output via the audio ports on the pi, right?
      - aselzer 12y ago
        Cool, didn't know that. Seems like the hardware has to be modified and it only supports 0-1V though: http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/8757/using-pis-built-in-audio-as-general-purpose-dac http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/8757/using-pi...
      - exDM69 12y ago
        PWM is useful because that can be used to drive servo motors and brushless DC motor controllers and other gadgets. It can't be easily replaced with analog output, e.g. from audio ports. OTOH, audio ports are a lot more useful if you need actual analog output.
        Sanddancer 12y ago
        PWM could be done with an op amp, a triangle wave generator, and a handful of discrete components. It's how the front-end of a Class D amp works. Would definitely be more of a pain in the butt than having pwm ports directly, though.
  - reidrac 12y ago
    "both 5V and 3.3V logic, meaning you can use pretty much any part without level shifters" Are you sure about that? It can provide different voltages in different pins, but the ATmega32u4 will work with 5v logic (if it is like the Leonardo, at 16MHz will be 5v), so you're in the same situation really and you won't be able to use a lot of 3.3v logic ICs without a translator. I can be wrong though and this one operates in a different way, but doubt it. EDIT: ignore me, the page says it has 3.3v logic pins. EDIT 2: right! they're provided by the Sitara processor and not the AVR, so I wasn't 100% wrong after all ;) See: https://github.com/CICCIOSGAMINO/arduino_TRE https://github.com/CICCIOSGAMINO/arduino_TRE
  - Narishma 12y ago
    Pi 1 B+ has 4 USB ports as well.
- iwwr 12y ago
  Arduino has more digital I/O pins and 6-7 pins that can do analog output (via PWM). This new Arduino has even more pins and can do both 3.3V and 5V logic, though I fail to see the advantage of mixing those up. Overall, Arduino draws lower power too. In any event, if you're looking for something with more pins, beaglebone black or olinuxino have them. https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/A20-OLinuXIno-LIME2/open-source-hardware https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/A20-OLinuXIno-... (that one has 1GB of RAM, gigabit ethernet and SATA2 capable of running a small laptop HDD off the board's power)
- Sanddancer 12y ago
  Gigabit ethernet that's not dangling off the USB bus, lots of I/O, a realtime micro that's well integrated into the board's architecture, USB OTG, analog inputs. This board seems much more useful if you need lower latency timing, where the Pi seems more useful if you need a small board to stick somewhere and do a bit of number crunching.
  - jbermudes 12y ago
    The page seems to only say 10/100. Is there a correction somewhere else?
    - Sanddancer 12y ago
      You're right. It looks like they're not using the onboard ethernet controllers for whatever reason, and instead dangling ethernet off of USB. So now I'm grumbly about that because the onboard ethernet is much more powerful.
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    I find it sad that RPI managed to suck the 'educational' market because of the price point, when the design is extremly obscure. Unless they planned to turn teenagers into hardware reverse engineer...
rdrey 12y ago
Cool! Has anyone heard of the price yet?
pronoiac 12y ago
Huh, there's an errant "Clock Speed: 16 MHz" there.
- damian2000 12y ago
  That's for the Atmel microcontroller part, the ARM processer is listed lower down
- georgemcbay 12y ago
  It isn't errant, there are just two processors handling different tasks. This is basically a BeagleBone Black with an integrated Arduino (for low-level compatibility with the Arduino shield ecosystem) that the more full-featured (but less real-time friendly) Linux-running part of the board can drive. The Atmel ATmega32u4 (the Arduino bit) is 16MHz, the more full-featured Linux/ARM part runs on a 1GHz Sitara AM3359AZCZ100 (ARM Cortex-A8) just like the BeagleBone Black.
ftollenaar 12y ago
So... Essentially an UDOO, but less powerful and (or so it seems from the picture) a different pin layout, making it incompatible with existing shields..?
- iwwr 12y ago
  It looks compatible with Uno shields, but adds more pins at 3.3V on the side.
- ambrop7 12y ago
  Agree. It's time to leave AVR uC's behind. There are many ARM chips on the market which are both faster and cheaper than AVR.
  - CamperBob2 12y ago
    Fast and cheap are not the only criteria. What ARM chips have the same peripherals as an AVR?
    - danellis 12y ago
      About a billion Cortex-M based MCUs from Atmel, ST, TI, NXP, etc. They typically have: GPIO with PWM, UART, SPI, I2C, I2S, Ethernet, USB (host, device, OTG), CAN, RS-423, SDIO... What peripherals do you think might be missing?
      - CamperBob2 12y ago
        Look at it from a different perspective. I agree that an argument centered on peripheral availability is no longer as applicable as it was just a couple of years ago. - No chip that needs an OS can truly replace an AVR. - No chip that takes more than two seconds to boot up can truly replace an AVR. - No chip with a 2,000-page data sheet can truly replace an AVR. - No chip that requires binary blobs to do anything interesting can truly replace an AVR. - No chip that's available only in a BGA or other leadless package can truly replace an AVR. - No chip that requires a 1-gigabyte toolchain installation (or, Woz forbid, a "cloud"-based toolchain) can truly replace an AVR. In general, no chip that wasn't explicitly designed to be easy to use by nonexperts can truly replace an AVR. Even lack of 5-volt compatibility has proven a handicap for some suitable candidates like the Cortex-M3 part used in the Arduino Due. Nobody in the hobbyist market cares if the chip costs $0.50 or $5.00. Their time is worth more than that. An 8-bit AVR can run 32-bit C code all day long without requiring the user to become a Linux sysadmin or wade through a bewildering selection of thousands of RTOSes, none of which are perfect for any one job. That is a huge deal.
Animats 12y ago
There's already the Arduino DUE, which has the Arduino form factor and pinout, with a very lightly configured ARM processor. It's supported by the Arduino toolchain, and you get more memory and a CPU with floating point hardware. It's far too small a machine to run Linux, but it's the next step up when an ARM CPU is just too wimpy. How do the two CPUs of the TRE talk to each other? Shared memory? I2C? USB?
- zecken 12y ago
  Probably UART, the same way the FTDI chip in new UNOs talks to the AVR. In any case, the reason having an ARM cpu w/ an AVR is beneficial is because you get the linux environment but real-time hardware GPIO access. This is far better than the software scheduling that bogs down RPis and makes it very difficult to do timing intensive tasks.
  - makomk 12y ago
    Except that the SoC they're using already has two PRU coprocessors designed for realtime IO support, and they have the advantage of being able to DMA to and from main memory rather than being limited to a slow serial link to the main CPU.
    - jws 12y ago
      Arduino's appeal is that doing simple tasks is simple. The PRU is not easy. TI introduced a C compiler for the PRU last year, but until then it has been an assembly only affair. (I haven't tried the compiler, I just discovered it while fact checking the first draft of this comment.)
- ambrop7 12y ago
  Actually the SAM3X8E does not have an FPU.
  - Animats 12y ago
    Ouch. You're right.
adv0r 12y ago
Arduino tre now manufactured in USA: thanks to Gianluca Martino, we lost a big star of made in Italy - background http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-arduino/ http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-ar...
esistgut 12y ago
"Arduino TRE, the first Arduino board manufactured in the U.S." As italian I feel a little bit sad about Arduino today being american hardware fully assembled in America. I wonder if they still print Italy and the italian flag on the PCB...
- floatboth 12y ago
  https://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-arduino/ https://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-a... tl;dr "if people bought an Arduino board made in Italy in the last year thinking they were supporting the project they should know that we didn’t receive any money for it despite the fact that we designed, documented, maintained and supported those products" – Massimo Banzi
_paulc 12y ago
The AM355x already has 2 x 32bit Programmable Realtime Units (PRU) [1] so the AVR seems a bit redundant (other than compatibility with existing shields and ease of programming) [1] http://elinux.org/BeagleBone_PRU_Notes http://elinux.org/BeagleBone_PRU_Notes
- danellis 12y ago
  Yeah, I don't see the point of the on-board AVR at all. It can't be just a voltage thing, because I'm sure they already have an ARM-only Arduino with shield headers.
- fest 12y ago
  Compatiblity with existing libraries and example code for other Arduinos is the key here. I find it surprising too, but there are people who do not really want to know all the low-level details but get the result quickly :)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
avinassh 12y ago
There are so many Arduinos. It was daunting for me when I was starting out. Following guides helped me to get started: - https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/arduino-comparison-guide https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/arduino-comparison-guid... - https://www.sparkfun.com/arduino_guide https://www.sparkfun.com/arduino_guide Do you know any more noob friendly comparison sites/articles?
- falcolas 12y ago
  I'm afraid I don't. I think it ultimately comes down to what you want to do with it. Personally, I'd recommend the Uno: it is a great basic Arduino platform which can handle most projects which utilize a micro controller. Once you've prototyped your project with the Uno and identified if you need more IO pins, or more speed, or a smaller unit, then you can look into replacing the Uno with one of the more specialized versions, and use the Uno to prototype your next project.
wolfgke 12y ago
Please correct me, but doesn't the GPU of Texas Instrument's Sitara AM3359AZCZ100 require a closed firmware blob - in other words the Arduino TRE will be a partly closed hardware (not in Arduino's open hardware spirit)?
- Narishma 12y ago
  The rule of thumb is if the GPU is not from Intel, then it requires a binary blob.
  - wolfgke 12y ago
    Is it at least possible to write an own OS (by using the firmware blob) or is the blob married to (GNU/)Linux?
    - Narishma 12y ago
      It looks like it has a PowerVR GPU, which would make it the later. If you want a board where you can write your own OS and still make use of the GPU, the Raspberry Pi is your best bet.
      - makomk 12y ago
        Note that I think this is only an issue if you want 3D acceleration - I believe that unlike on the Pi, modesetting is open source and possibly even documented, so you should be able to turn on the display output and set up a framebuffer you can write to without touching any of the proprietary bits.
        Narishma 12y ago
        The Pi works differently from other computers I've seen, in that the GPU is responsible for booting the system, and so it always needs the binary blob to start. Think of it as the equivalent of the BIOS on a PC, except it runs on the GPU instead of the CPU, and it's stored on an SD card instead of ROM. But as far as your own OS is concerned, how you communicate with it if fully documented. So you can do modesetting, and you can do hardware acceleration and whatnot. I believe the only thing you can't do on non-linux OSes is video decoding, but I'm not exactly sure.
minthd 12y ago
I'm not sure if arduino is a good platform to spend time on, see[1]. One the other hand, the mbed: "With all the investments ARM is putting into the mbed and the mbed-os(and it's huge amount of internet of things features) ,with features like automatic selection of sleep modes via easy to use sleep api's[1] , the better though out API(things like FastPWM, FastIO, SIMPLEDMA and others) , the community being more professional so it probably means better code, and the better license enabling easy use in production , and the large amount of ARM microcontrollers availble for it, isn't this the better time investment for the future ?" [2]. [1]http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=253582.0 http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=253582.0 [2]http://www.eetimes.com/messages.asp?piddl_msgthreadid=47423&piddl_msgpage=1#msgs http://www.eetimes.com/messages.asp?piddl_msgthreadid=47423&...
- Sanddancer 12y ago
  I've got one of the NXP mbed boards, and it's an interesting piece of hardware, however, the current mbed toolchain is kind of ridiculous. In order to use the more interesting features, you're pretty much required to use their web-based IDE, and forego a lot of the nice features of, say, eclipse. Also, I have issues with certain decisions they've made, like having floating point only libraries for PWM, which means you have to waste a lot of clocks, and code, just to make the lights work. Then again, with AVRs, I'm using Atmel Studio a lot these days for similar reasons instead of the Arduino environment. The abstraction layers don't quite mesh with what I'm trying, which means writing I'm writing around the Arduino a lot more than I'm writing for the Arduino. Perhaps it's just time for getting back to basics with the lower level libraries.
  - minthd 12y ago
    With regards to PWM issues you've mentioned , have you looked at alternative libraries ? a rough search brough me this[1](and there might be others), an it claims to solve most of the floating point problem. >> In order to use the more interesting features, you're pretty much required to use their web-based IDE, What features are those ? [1]http://developer.mbed.org/users/jocis/code/HighPWM/docs/923b54e7c2c1/classHighPWM.html http://developer.mbed.org/users/jocis/code/HighPWM/docs/923b...
jbuzbee 12y ago
Discussion of the ESP286 here on Hacker news seems limited. Looks like a great alternative for low-cost use. It's a $5 microcontroller board with WIFI which now can be programmed with the Arduino development environment: http://makezine.com/2015/04/01/esp8266-5-microcontroller-wi-fi-now-arduino-compatible/ http://makezine.com/2015/04/01/esp8266-5-microcontroller-wi-...
rasz_pl 12y ago
so a BeagleBone Black with adruino on its head goes to the doctors office. Doctor asks 'what seems to be the problem?'. Arduino replies "I've got something stuck to my ass!". but now at 1.5 times the price of individual components! BB is $55, minis are $3. This thing will be what, ~$70? Arduino abomination glued to the AR9331 is ~$80 (Yun), while bare atheros chips are $5 in china, whole routers ~$15. I dont see the point of this new one either. Even if they somehow got the best deal ever out of TI it will not be economical compared to BBB.

Arduino TRE

79 points by x43b 12y ago

emranemran 12y ago

Wasn't this board announced a while back?

kasbah 12y ago
Yes, ages ago.

mayoff 12y ago

What is the advantage of this over a Raspberry Pi?

damian2000 12y ago
Two I can think of ... it includes a low cost Atmel microcontroller so it can be used for prototyping low cost/low power usage applications, in the same way as the original Arduino. Its compatible with Arduino shields.
Fradow 12y ago
There are several advantages: - both 5V and 3.3V logic, meaning you can use pretty much any part without level shifters - analog inputs (which are really lacking on Raspberry Pi if you want to use sensors) - 4 USB host ports (only the Pi 2 has as much) - the simplicity of Arduino for electronics, coupled with a Linux for other tasks On the other hand, I expect it to be more expensive, and probably less powerfull than a Raspberry Pi. It is definitely aimed to big electronics project that requires both a lot of GPIO and a full-fledged OS, for which you would formerly use a board running Linux + an Arduino
- aselzer 12y ago
  also: 7 hardware PWM outputs (the Pi has one)
  - iwwr 12y ago
    You can sort-of do analog input-output via the audio ports on the pi, right?
    - aselzer 12y ago
      Cool, didn't know that. Seems like the hardware has to be modified and it only supports 0-1V though: http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/8757/using-pis-built-in-audio-as-general-purpose-dac http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/8757/using-pi...
    - exDM69 12y ago
      PWM is useful because that can be used to drive servo motors and brushless DC motor controllers and other gadgets. It can't be easily replaced with analog output, e.g. from audio ports. OTOH, audio ports are a lot more useful if you need actual analog output.
      - Sanddancer 12y ago
        PWM could be done with an op amp, a triangle wave generator, and a handful of discrete components. It's how the front-end of a Class D amp works. Would definitely be more of a pain in the butt than having pwm ports directly, though.
- reidrac 12y ago
  "both 5V and 3.3V logic, meaning you can use pretty much any part without level shifters" Are you sure about that? It can provide different voltages in different pins, but the ATmega32u4 will work with 5v logic (if it is like the Leonardo, at 16MHz will be 5v), so you're in the same situation really and you won't be able to use a lot of 3.3v logic ICs without a translator. I can be wrong though and this one operates in a different way, but doubt it. EDIT: ignore me, the page says it has 3.3v logic pins. EDIT 2: right! they're provided by the Sitara processor and not the AVR, so I wasn't 100% wrong after all ;) See: https://github.com/CICCIOSGAMINO/arduino_TRE https://github.com/CICCIOSGAMINO/arduino_TRE
- Narishma 12y ago
  Pi 1 B+ has 4 USB ports as well.
iwwr 12y ago
Arduino has more digital I/O pins and 6-7 pins that can do analog output (via PWM). This new Arduino has even more pins and can do both 3.3V and 5V logic, though I fail to see the advantage of mixing those up. Overall, Arduino draws lower power too. In any event, if you're looking for something with more pins, beaglebone black or olinuxino have them. https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/A20-OLinuXIno-LIME2/open-source-hardware https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/A20-OLinuXIno-... (that one has 1GB of RAM, gigabit ethernet and SATA2 capable of running a small laptop HDD off the board's power)
Sanddancer 12y ago
Gigabit ethernet that's not dangling off the USB bus, lots of I/O, a realtime micro that's well integrated into the board's architecture, USB OTG, analog inputs. This board seems much more useful if you need lower latency timing, where the Pi seems more useful if you need a small board to stick somewhere and do a bit of number crunching.
- jbermudes 12y ago
  The page seems to only say 10/100. Is there a correction somewhere else?
  - Sanddancer 12y ago
    You're right. It looks like they're not using the onboard ethernet controllers for whatever reason, and instead dangling ethernet off of USB. So now I'm grumbly about that because the onboard ethernet is much more powerful.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  I find it sad that RPI managed to suck the 'educational' market because of the price point, when the design is extremly obscure. Unless they planned to turn teenagers into hardware reverse engineer...

rdrey 12y ago

Cool! Has anyone heard of the price yet?

pronoiac 12y ago

Huh, there's an errant "Clock Speed: 16 MHz" there.

damian2000 12y ago
That's for the Atmel microcontroller part, the ARM processer is listed lower down
georgemcbay 12y ago
It isn't errant, there are just two processors handling different tasks. This is basically a BeagleBone Black with an integrated Arduino (for low-level compatibility with the Arduino shield ecosystem) that the more full-featured (but less real-time friendly) Linux-running part of the board can drive. The Atmel ATmega32u4 (the Arduino bit) is 16MHz, the more full-featured Linux/ARM part runs on a 1GHz Sitara AM3359AZCZ100 (ARM Cortex-A8) just like the BeagleBone Black.

ftollenaar 12y ago

So... Essentially an UDOO, but less powerful and (or so it seems from the picture) a different pin layout, making it incompatible with existing shields..?

iwwr 12y ago
It looks compatible with Uno shields, but adds more pins at 3.3V on the side.
ambrop7 12y ago
Agree. It's time to leave AVR uC's behind. There are many ARM chips on the market which are both faster and cheaper than AVR.
- CamperBob2 12y ago
  Fast and cheap are not the only criteria. What ARM chips have the same peripherals as an AVR?
  - danellis 12y ago
    About a billion Cortex-M based MCUs from Atmel, ST, TI, NXP, etc. They typically have: GPIO with PWM, UART, SPI, I2C, I2S, Ethernet, USB (host, device, OTG), CAN, RS-423, SDIO... What peripherals do you think might be missing?
    - CamperBob2 12y ago
      Look at it from a different perspective. I agree that an argument centered on peripheral availability is no longer as applicable as it was just a couple of years ago. - No chip that needs an OS can truly replace an AVR. - No chip that takes more than two seconds to boot up can truly replace an AVR. - No chip with a 2,000-page data sheet can truly replace an AVR. - No chip that requires binary blobs to do anything interesting can truly replace an AVR. - No chip that's available only in a BGA or other leadless package can truly replace an AVR. - No chip that requires a 1-gigabyte toolchain installation (or, Woz forbid, a "cloud"-based toolchain) can truly replace an AVR. In general, no chip that wasn't explicitly designed to be easy to use by nonexperts can truly replace an AVR. Even lack of 5-volt compatibility has proven a handicap for some suitable candidates like the Cortex-M3 part used in the Arduino Due. Nobody in the hobbyist market cares if the chip costs $0.50 or $5.00. Their time is worth more than that. An 8-bit AVR can run 32-bit C code all day long without requiring the user to become a Linux sysadmin or wade through a bewildering selection of thousands of RTOSes, none of which are perfect for any one job. That is a huge deal.

Animats 12y ago

There's already the Arduino DUE, which has the Arduino form factor and pinout, with a very lightly configured ARM processor. It's supported by the Arduino toolchain, and you get more memory and a CPU with floating point hardware. It's far too small a machine to run Linux, but it's the next step up when an ARM CPU is just too wimpy. How do the two CPUs of the TRE talk to each other? Shared memory? I2C? USB?

zecken 12y ago
Probably UART, the same way the FTDI chip in new UNOs talks to the AVR. In any case, the reason having an ARM cpu w/ an AVR is beneficial is because you get the linux environment but real-time hardware GPIO access. This is far better than the software scheduling that bogs down RPis and makes it very difficult to do timing intensive tasks.
- makomk 12y ago
  Except that the SoC they're using already has two PRU coprocessors designed for realtime IO support, and they have the advantage of being able to DMA to and from main memory rather than being limited to a slow serial link to the main CPU.
  - jws 12y ago
    Arduino's appeal is that doing simple tasks is simple. The PRU is not easy. TI introduced a C compiler for the PRU last year, but until then it has been an assembly only affair. (I haven't tried the compiler, I just discovered it while fact checking the first draft of this comment.)
ambrop7 12y ago
Actually the SAM3X8E does not have an FPU.
- Animats 12y ago
  Ouch. You're right.

adv0r 12y ago

Arduino tre now manufactured in USA: thanks to Gianluca Martino, we lost a big star of made in Italy - background http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-arduino/ http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-ar...

esistgut 12y ago

"Arduino TRE, the first Arduino board manufactured in the U.S." As italian I feel a little bit sad about Arduino today being american hardware fully assembled in America. I wonder if they still print Italy and the italian flag on the PCB...

floatboth 12y ago
https://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-arduino/ https://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-a... tl;dr "if people bought an Arduino board made in Italy in the last year thinking they were supporting the project they should know that we didn’t receive any money for it despite the fact that we designed, documented, maintained and supported those products" – Massimo Banzi

_paulc 12y ago

The AM355x already has 2 x 32bit Programmable Realtime Units (PRU) [1] so the AVR seems a bit redundant (other than compatibility with existing shields and ease of programming) [1] http://elinux.org/BeagleBone_PRU_Notes http://elinux.org/BeagleBone_PRU_Notes

danellis 12y ago
Yeah, I don't see the point of the on-board AVR at all. It can't be just a voltage thing, because I'm sure they already have an ARM-only Arduino with shield headers.
fest 12y ago
Compatiblity with existing libraries and example code for other Arduinos is the key here. I find it surprising too, but there are people who do not really want to know all the low-level details but get the result quickly :)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

avinassh 12y ago

There are so many Arduinos. It was daunting for me when I was starting out. Following guides helped me to get started: - https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/arduino-comparison-guide https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/arduino-comparison-guid... - https://www.sparkfun.com/arduino_guide https://www.sparkfun.com/arduino_guide Do you know any more noob friendly comparison sites/articles?

falcolas 12y ago
I'm afraid I don't. I think it ultimately comes down to what you want to do with it. Personally, I'd recommend the Uno: it is a great basic Arduino platform which can handle most projects which utilize a micro controller. Once you've prototyped your project with the Uno and identified if you need more IO pins, or more speed, or a smaller unit, then you can look into replacing the Uno with one of the more specialized versions, and use the Uno to prototype your next project.

wolfgke 12y ago

Please correct me, but doesn't the GPU of Texas Instrument's Sitara AM3359AZCZ100 require a closed firmware blob - in other words the Arduino TRE will be a partly closed hardware (not in Arduino's open hardware spirit)?

Narishma 12y ago
The rule of thumb is if the GPU is not from Intel, then it requires a binary blob.
- wolfgke 12y ago
  Is it at least possible to write an own OS (by using the firmware blob) or is the blob married to (GNU/)Linux?
  - Narishma 12y ago
    It looks like it has a PowerVR GPU, which would make it the later. If you want a board where you can write your own OS and still make use of the GPU, the Raspberry Pi is your best bet.
    - makomk 12y ago
      Note that I think this is only an issue if you want 3D acceleration - I believe that unlike on the Pi, modesetting is open source and possibly even documented, so you should be able to turn on the display output and set up a framebuffer you can write to without touching any of the proprietary bits.
      - Narishma 12y ago
        The Pi works differently from other computers I've seen, in that the GPU is responsible for booting the system, and so it always needs the binary blob to start. Think of it as the equivalent of the BIOS on a PC, except it runs on the GPU instead of the CPU, and it's stored on an SD card instead of ROM. But as far as your own OS is concerned, how you communicate with it if fully documented. So you can do modesetting, and you can do hardware acceleration and whatnot. I believe the only thing you can't do on non-linux OSes is video decoding, but I'm not exactly sure.

minthd 12y ago

I'm not sure if arduino is a good platform to spend time on, see[1]. One the other hand, the mbed: "With all the investments ARM is putting into the mbed and the mbed-os(and it's huge amount of internet of things features) ,with features like automatic selection of sleep modes via easy to use sleep api's[1] , the better though out API(things like FastPWM, FastIO, SIMPLEDMA and others) , the community being more professional so it probably means better code, and the better license enabling easy use in production , and the large amount of ARM microcontrollers availble for it, isn't this the better time investment for the future ?" [2]. [1]http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=253582.0 http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=253582.0 [2]http://www.eetimes.com/messages.asp?piddl_msgthreadid=47423&piddl_msgpage=1#msgs http://www.eetimes.com/messages.asp?piddl_msgthreadid=47423&...

Sanddancer 12y ago
I've got one of the NXP mbed boards, and it's an interesting piece of hardware, however, the current mbed toolchain is kind of ridiculous. In order to use the more interesting features, you're pretty much required to use their web-based IDE, and forego a lot of the nice features of, say, eclipse. Also, I have issues with certain decisions they've made, like having floating point only libraries for PWM, which means you have to waste a lot of clocks, and code, just to make the lights work. Then again, with AVRs, I'm using Atmel Studio a lot these days for similar reasons instead of the Arduino environment. The abstraction layers don't quite mesh with what I'm trying, which means writing I'm writing around the Arduino a lot more than I'm writing for the Arduino. Perhaps it's just time for getting back to basics with the lower level libraries.
- minthd 12y ago
  With regards to PWM issues you've mentioned , have you looked at alternative libraries ? a rough search brough me this[1](and there might be others), an it claims to solve most of the floating point problem. >> In order to use the more interesting features, you're pretty much required to use their web-based IDE, What features are those ? [1]http://developer.mbed.org/users/jocis/code/HighPWM/docs/923b54e7c2c1/classHighPWM.html http://developer.mbed.org/users/jocis/code/HighPWM/docs/923b...

jbuzbee 12y ago

Discussion of the ESP286 here on Hacker news seems limited. Looks like a great alternative for low-cost use. It's a $5 microcontroller board with WIFI which now can be programmed with the Arduino development environment: http://makezine.com/2015/04/01/esp8266-5-microcontroller-wi-fi-now-arduino-compatible/ http://makezine.com/2015/04/01/esp8266-5-microcontroller-wi-...

rasz_pl 12y ago

so a BeagleBone Black with adruino on its head goes to the doctors office. Doctor asks 'what seems to be the problem?'. Arduino replies "I've got something stuck to my ass!". but now at 1.5 times the price of individual components! BB is $55, minis are $3. This thing will be what, ~$70? Arduino abomination glued to the AR9331 is ~$80 (Yun), while bare atheros chips are $5 in china, whole routers ~$15. I dont see the point of this new one either. Even if they somehow got the best deal ever out of TI it will not be economical compared to BBB.