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Re: Arduino
by Brian B. Riley
::
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I bought a Sparkfun <http://www.sparkfun.com> Arduino board
(Atmega168, USB, $35 assembled, not a kit), they are quite nice,
well made.
Peter Anderson pointed me to Paul Badger's site <http://
www.moderndevice.com>. Paul has a very nice "Bare Bones Arduino"
Atmega168 kit, with a good board and flexible configuration for
$10-15 (depends on quantity) and quick service and modest S/H fees.
Paul also sells the FTDI TTL-232R USB to TTL cable for $19 which
brings out +5, GND, TxD, RxD, RTS, CTS) to a 6 pin .100 spaced socket
header. The same cable from FTDI is $20 plus the usual much large S/H
fee of big corporations. I am planning to buy a second one of these
cables as I have already found a myriad of other uses for the first,
far beyond my Arduinp investigations.
I think the label of Arduino as a 'stamp replacement' is not
without merit. Its a good stable platform with a reasonably peppy
processor and capabilities. Its IDE is solid and accommodating for
programmers with minimal hardware experience. With boards like Paul
Badger's available I could buy 10 kits at $10 each for $100, which
is the price of 2 Basic Stamps. Its a great platform for quick and
dirty one-off or even 5-or-10-off projects.
So far I am just dabbling, getting familiar with all it does. I got
started with the Atmega168 in the Command Module add-on for the
iRobot Create unit and have become increasingly impressed with the
overall AVR community and wealth of resources.
It has been particularly gratifying now since Arduino came with a
ready made MacOSX IDE and I just got done working with a group at
iRobot hammering out a clean GUI to put on top of OSXAVR for the
iRobot Create Command Module work. Not having to reboot into Winders
is helpful. (contrary to publicity Parallels Desktop virtualization
does not handle USB very well at all.)
---
cheers ... 73 de brian riley, n1bq , underhill center, vermont
<http://web.mac.com/brianbr/> Tech Blog
<http://www.wulfden.org/TheShoppe.shtml>
Home of the
K107 Serial LCD Controller Kit FT817 Power Conditioner Kit
Tab Robot Laser Tag Kit MSP430 Chips and Connectors
Propeller Robot Controller SX48 "Tech Board" Kit
PICAXE chips, boards, and accessories
On Jun 6, 2007, at 12:23 PM, William Chops Westfield wrote:
> Anyone want to talk about Arduino? I've been playing with it a bit
> recently, and I'm wondering just how much time I should invest in
> it...
>
> Arduino seems to be a microcontroller environment aimed at
> non-engineers, sorta like Parallax's Basic Stamp. There have been
> websites calling it a Stamp Replacement, in fact. The hardware is an
> ATmega8 or mega168 with USB or Serial interface, ISP connector, and a
> standardized layout of 13 "digital IO" pins and 6 "analog input" pins.
> The software consists of an IDE that works on top of (and vastly
> simplifies) gcc, some startup and library code (an environment
> apparently called "wiring"), and a bootloader. It runs on Macs,
> Windows, and linux.
>
> It's cute. All the HW and SW is open source. I think the concept of
> wrapping some user-friendly IDE and pre-processing around gcc is
> pretty
> close to brilliant, but then I don't really need it. There are other
> advantages and disadvantages:
>
> + Simplified SW IDE
> - not small; runtime+bootloader is approx 4k
> + moderately capable HW.
> + Standardized connector layout enables "shields."
> - connector layout is 'odd'; not "on-grid"
> --
> http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
> View/change your membership options at
> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist
--
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist
(Atmega168, USB, $35 assembled, not a kit), they are quite nice,
well made.
Peter Anderson pointed me to Paul Badger's site <http://
www.moderndevice.com>. Paul has a very nice "Bare Bones Arduino"
Atmega168 kit, with a good board and flexible configuration for
$10-15 (depends on quantity) and quick service and modest S/H fees.
Paul also sells the FTDI TTL-232R USB to TTL cable for $19 which
brings out +5, GND, TxD, RxD, RTS, CTS) to a 6 pin .100 spaced socket
header. The same cable from FTDI is $20 plus the usual much large S/H
fee of big corporations. I am planning to buy a second one of these
cables as I have already found a myriad of other uses for the first,
far beyond my Arduinp investigations.
I think the label of Arduino as a 'stamp replacement' is not
without merit. Its a good stable platform with a reasonably peppy
processor and capabilities. Its IDE is solid and accommodating for
programmers with minimal hardware experience. With boards like Paul
Badger's available I could buy 10 kits at $10 each for $100, which
is the price of 2 Basic Stamps. Its a great platform for quick and
dirty one-off or even 5-or-10-off projects.
So far I am just dabbling, getting familiar with all it does. I got
started with the Atmega168 in the Command Module add-on for the
iRobot Create unit and have become increasingly impressed with the
overall AVR community and wealth of resources.
It has been particularly gratifying now since Arduino came with a
ready made MacOSX IDE and I just got done working with a group at
iRobot hammering out a clean GUI to put on top of OSXAVR for the
iRobot Create Command Module work. Not having to reboot into Winders
is helpful. (contrary to publicity Parallels Desktop virtualization
does not handle USB very well at all.)
---
cheers ... 73 de brian riley, n1bq , underhill center, vermont
<http://web.mac.com/brianbr/> Tech Blog
<http://www.wulfden.org/TheShoppe.shtml>
Home of the
K107 Serial LCD Controller Kit FT817 Power Conditioner Kit
Tab Robot Laser Tag Kit MSP430 Chips and Connectors
Propeller Robot Controller SX48 "Tech Board" Kit
PICAXE chips, boards, and accessories
On Jun 6, 2007, at 12:23 PM, William Chops Westfield wrote:
> Anyone want to talk about Arduino? I've been playing with it a bit
> recently, and I'm wondering just how much time I should invest in
> it...
>
> Arduino seems to be a microcontroller environment aimed at
> non-engineers, sorta like Parallax's Basic Stamp. There have been
> websites calling it a Stamp Replacement, in fact. The hardware is an
> ATmega8 or mega168 with USB or Serial interface, ISP connector, and a
> standardized layout of 13 "digital IO" pins and 6 "analog input" pins.
> The software consists of an IDE that works on top of (and vastly
> simplifies) gcc, some startup and library code (an environment
> apparently called "wiring"), and a bootloader. It runs on Macs,
> Windows, and linux.
>
> It's cute. All the HW and SW is open source. I think the concept of
> wrapping some user-friendly IDE and pre-processing around gcc is
> pretty
> close to brilliant, but then I don't really need it. There are other
> advantages and disadvantages:
>
> + Simplified SW IDE
> - not small; runtime+bootloader is approx 4k
> + moderately capable HW.
> + Standardized connector layout enables "shields."
> - connector layout is 'odd'; not "on-grid"
> --
> http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
> View/change your membership options at
> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist
--
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist
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