On Sunday, May 17, 2015 at 12:49:21 PM UTC-4, Michael Terrell wrote:
Spehro Pefhany wrote:

On Sat, 16 May 2015 20:07:21 -0700 (PDT), the renowned rangerssuck
wrote:

On Saturday, May 16, 2015 at 5:35:43 PM UTC-4, Michael Terrell wrote:

Karl, there are quite a few levels of Arduino boards. Look at their
website to get a better understanding.

http://arduino.cc/

And then when you've got your design working, you can build it with just the AVR chip and leave out the other Arduino stuff, if you want to. I've built MANY things that started as Arduino boards for the easy prototyping and ended up as dedicated PC boards.

Welcome aboard, Tom. There may be hope for you yet. And all kidding aside, if you can blink and LED, you can do pretty much anything (assuming you also can read an input). If you can blink an LED in response to an input, you really can do anything.

And Holy crap, I'm on the same page as RogerN on this as well. Working with smaller controllers lets you get MUCH closer to the hardware. there is no operating system in the way. (zowie, could the end-times REALLY be near? ;-)

I don't know if it exists yet, but my interest in Beagle Bone and it's ilk will be higher when there is a real-time deterministic operating system available. No question that some of my designs need more horsepower. Often, I just divide up the tasks and add another AVR. For instance, I'm currently working on a line-scan camera that has four AVRs (all mega 328s). The tasks divide up nicely and I have the tools and the parts, and don't have to learn (or buy) anything new to get the job done. and nobody's going to cry about the $12 worth of extra parts.

The BBBlack TI processor includes two 200MHz 32-bit RISC co-processors
that can be used for real-time tasks.

I'm not sure that there is a huge advantage to running an open-source
RTOS (especially one that is not widely used) on the main processor
when most of what it is doing is running communication stacks.


Some people have hacked the USB to serial interfaces:
https://jethomson.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/project-ouroboros-reflashing-a-betemcu-usbasp-programmer/
for a tiny, but useful computer. The programmer he converted, is dirt
cheap on Ebay.

Micocenter regularly sells their Arduino Uno clone for $9.99. This week, it is on sale for $5.99. THAT is dirt cheap.

But then, there's http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-ATmega32...em3cebc0 9d60, an uno clone from hongkong for $4.08 or http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-ATmega32...em3ce634 d3c9 a pre-programmed mega328 chip for $1.77.