RE: Growing Out of UNO

Former Member — Mon, 08 Jun 2015 19:27:08 GMT

There are endless supply of other processors and platforms out there, with many being well under the Arduino's price point and usually starting with 10x the performance and/or features.

I have configured a [search on Mouser] to illustrate the possibilities, which I feel are amazing and mind blowing.

Cypress has [$4 red PSoC] boards are about the closest to an arduino, albeit with 20+ GPIO and a 24MHz Cortex M0 processor. Along with these are configurable internal digital logic modules and op-amps and comparators. It took this EE a week at least to begin to understand the capabilities; and who knows when (or if) I'll understand how to leverage this flexibility. For twice the price (yes, $9), you can have a Cortex M3 with built in CAN controller, I2C, more UART than imaginable. And that bad boy has 24 universal design blocks for configuring logic around the processor. The drawback to the power of PSoC is a huge IDE that is quite a memory hog in Windows.

There are STM32 offerings using pin-outs compatible with Arduino that start around $10. Haven't researched their development yet but have some on the way.

Great to see ChipKIT mentioned. They are probably the closest thing to Arduino with "real power". They can be programmed with microchip's "mpide", which they ported from Arduino IDE. Also do not forget About UECIDE | UECIDE and that it is a central IDE that can program Arduino, ChipKIT, and Launchpad TI.

Page 3 of that Mouser search goes from $12.95 to $16.48 and has the Freescale Freedom platform, Launchpad TI, and more. The Freedom boards seem the best alternative with Arduino compatible pins. They start showing up on page 2 for $12.95. (granted I haven't yet evaluated the $10 NUCLEO boards)

In my observation, the freedom boards offer the most to someone stepping up from Arduino, while the other various small form factors are great for when the end result is a "box" and pinout doesn't really matter. For my latest project, once I had the design sorted out, I used a pro mini for the permanent solution and soldered wires to the shield implementing the hardware interface.

[View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-58720caa-d7f4-4c62-a050-4a86965429ea/contentimage_5F00_1.png:16:16] Chris

RE: Growing Out of UNO

screamingtiger — Thu, 04 Jun 2015 17:45:27 GMT

Don't forget the ChipKit PI with the PIC32 on it. Its a good step from adruino because they have ported many parts of the library over, and the MPIDE they provide is spin off of the arduino IDE.

I personally will be trying the propeller HAT very soon. They have released a C compiler now so I feel it is finally usable for the general population. I know the SPIN language is supposed to be easy but I don't care to learn some odd ball scripting language for each platform I want to use. I would rather keep the language the same and learn the libraries instead.

RE: Growing Out of UNO

nevyn — Fri, 08 May 2015 05:44:31 GMT

Nice to see the STM8 microcontrollers getting some love and attention, I think they are very underrated especially when the Discovery boards are such good value.

Next step for me, probably the STM32 Discovery board with either the CooCox development environment of Visual Studio with VisualGDB...

Love the embedded podcast.