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*promote

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Monday, January 10th, 2011 2:13pm PST - promote requested by original submitter dan00108.

At first these boards really annoyed me, they have 20mhz processors, faster than the PCs in my high school computer lab, and are used mostly to switch a few lights on and off.

After I bought one to work on projects with some other people, I realised that while they are an immense waste of processing power, these things make bread-boarding a hell of a lot easier than when I had to pull and flash chips for every firmware revision. There is also all the time you save by not having to rebuild the basics of voltage regulators/ output resisters and such for every project.

I suppose I'm still stuck in the past, but when I hear of people selling consumer gadgets that have a barely utilised arduino inside ( I have met people that do this), it makes me cringe.

I get that things pass a price threshold where devel time becomes more expensive than underutilised hardware, but I still can't seem to completely get over my moral indignation. Won't stop me from using one though, and at ~$20 a pop, I'll probably get some more.

I am doing the AVR thing right now, but not with Arduino. I am using Atmel AVR Studio for coding, writing in C only and trying to write all my own low level stuff.

I am working to make a solid core where everything is interrupt driven, which has been an exciting challenge to have all these state machines in progress simultaneously. With a TWI bus sending and receiving, a UART sending and receiving, and timer interrupts debouncing my keypad. I have had apps where the program was literally an endless loop doing nothing
for ( ;; )
{

}

Yet it might be capturing serial bytes off the UART and sending them out TWI to another AVR.

Super awesome I am having a good time at it, who needs sleep.

>> ^deathcow:

I am doing the AVR thing right now, but not with Arduino.


I work with AVR in C/ASM as well, which is why Arduino initially annoyed me. The Arduino system forces you to use a large pre-loaded library, which assumes lots of bloaty things, like non-native 16bit math, so any low level work, like software uarts, or anything else highly time dependant is much more of a pain to implement.

Of course you can always do inline ASM, if you need to count the timing.

I tend to proto with my Ardunio, and then port over to an attiny once my other circuitry is working. It especially useful for doing proof of concept before you put too much time into something.

The best thing about these boards: they are cheap. I had to drop >$100 to get a devel board and chips, and necessary peripheral components when I started doing AVR 6 years ago. Now somebody can get in the door for <$20 and they can be up and running in less than an hour, with only the most basic understanding of programming, and a common usb cable.

I am using a baby orangutan board from Pololu, it was under 20, but I needed to pick up a USB programmer too so I'm in for about $35 : ) Prebuilt libs make me really nervous. If I am making something I can sell, I will sleep better knowing I crafted my serial and TWI drivers.

>> ^deathcow:

I am using a baby orangutan board from Pololu.


Pretty cool board, it send me on a google rampage, seeing what else was out there. I just wanted to mention that I found the teensy which is a bare bones AVR with USB programmer on chip, which can run either straight AVR C or Arduino sketches, no FTDI board required all for <$20.
I will give Arduino some credit for opening up this eco-system, and I think they are great for noobs, but you are right there are a lot of great dev-boards out there now that allow you to harness the real potential of the hardware.