Arduino

Wow, EXCITING! One whole LED? Be still, my heart.

You're dating yourself, sir.

Yeabut - that led is the just the beginning, think of the possibilities...next, I'll blink TWO LEDs!

I came, I squinted, I conquered! See, 4 years of Latin sure pays off!

He rearranged them to change the meaning.

What, no digital/pdf versions around so you can print your own, larger type version?

Won't that boil your blood?

No, I fixed it. Now it says: I saw, I conquered, I came.

Squinted? You're turning Japanese, I think you're turning Japanese, I really think so. Oh, were you making an elderly joke?

My arduino came from Radio Shack's close out. I started with Blink, got a GRBL driver shield from China and found GRBL and EFL software to stream g-code to the arduino uno.

Just now it's sending 3D g-code from a huge down loaded file to test the setup. This is way outside anything I know about.

There are some better looking free programs out there but so far the Engineering For Less free program seems to work OK. I don't have to write arduino code with the EFL CNC software. It comes up on google.

No CNC machine yet, just 3 steppers and a 12 volt power supply twirling little paper tags. Great fun!

They're kind of fun once you get past the horrible software written by confused people they come with.

Mine didn't come with people. Perhaps the Chinese left something out of the box?

I can fix it.

The IDE for arduino stuff is utter shit with a horrible user interface and awful default behavior.

Actually, the Beagle Bone is a better deal. You get a full Linux system, with all the networking features available. It also has 2 200 MHz 32-bit microcontrollers that have about a dozen pins brought out for each, and shared memory to the Arm CPU. These are great for bit-banging odd protocols, generating step pulses or some other thing that isn't directly supported by on-chip peripherals.

I updated a laser photoplotter I built about 16 years ago, using a DMA card on the ISA bus, on a Windows 95 computer. Not only could the microcontroller emulate the DMA card, but it could also unpack run-length encoded data in real time. File sizes of 1000x1000 DPI raster images get big, so compessing them is really nice.

I've used various versions of the Beagles for network appliance devices before, and they are great. You can use Glade to develop the user interfaces graphically.

Jon

For mine, I bought some terminal boards that plug in the Arduino from Jameco Electronics. Also I bought a board with a LCD display and some buttons from Hobbypartz.com. Other boards have more capability in pure processing power, but the basic Arduino's work with 5V logic and have the chip in a socket, if you burn it up you can replace for ~$5 with the bootloader in place. The Arduino works with their langauge but you can also us "C" language, so get the documentation for GNU C for more capabilities.

I wrote a program that uses timers modeled after Allen Bradley PLC timers.

I also have BeagleBone Black and Raspberry PI, they have processing power and lots of memory but I don't feel like I control all the code like I do in an Arduino. Also I can't replace the processor as easily if I make a mistake in the wiring.

RogerN

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Roger, I played with PicBasic controllers for a while...

Seemed like a simple entry level control unit. How does these compare to arduino?

The Arduino has a lot more instruction and variable memory. The Arduino compiles your program to actually run in the microcontroller and full speed. The Basic Stamp stores the user program in serial eprom and reads and executes it from there.

The Arduino uses the free Gnu C Compiler and their language is just C functions in libraries. You can download the Arduino programming software for free and look at the samples, I thought it was easy to learn.

There are Arduino compatible boards for less $$ too.

RogerN

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

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Not in the order which he has it. And it depends on the alternate English meaning of "came" to translate the same in Latin. I

*don't* know Latin (except enough to recognize the warping of the traditional saying). :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

And then when you've got your design working, you can build it with just th e AVR chip and leave out the other Arduino stuff, if you want to. I've buil t MANY things that started as Arduino boards for the easy prototyping and e nded 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 als o 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 ava ilable. 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 w orking 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 lear n (or buy) anything new to get the job done. and nobody's going to cry abou t 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.