Arduino

Some people have hacked the USB to serial interfaces: for a tiny, but useful computer. The programmer he converted, is dirt cheap on Ebay.

st 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.

ide, if you can blink and LED, you can do pretty much anything (assuming yo u also can read an input). If you can blink an LED in response to an input, you really can do anything.

with smaller controllers lets you get MUCH closer to the hardware. there i s no operating system in the way. (zowie, could the end-times REALLY be nea r? ;-)

ilk will be higher when there is a real-time deterministic operating syste m available. No question that some of my designs need more horsepower. Ofte n, I just divide up the tasks and add another AVR. For instance, I'm curren tly working on a line-scan camera that has four AVRs (all mega 328s). The t asks 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.

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

an uno clone from hongkong for $4.08 or a pre-programmed mega328 chip for $1.77.

I saw some ATmega chips with more memory and 40 pin DIP packages. I wonder how difficult it would be to make one of those Arduino compatible? I just thought it would be nice to have the most I/O and memory available with 5V and DIP packaging.

RogerN

$2.46 each, including shipping.

It crashes frequently too. But the bones are good- GCC is the underlying compiler.

I dunno, I use Arduino 1.6.0 (not the latest) on Windows 7 & 8.1, with notepad++ as the editor, and it just seems to work. Have not yet tried under linux, but I may be moving in that direction soon.

I'm not wild about having files stored all over the place - why are libraries being stored in my Documents directory? But I just plug it in and it goes.

For some other products, I just use the gcc tools directly, but for quick & dirty, and to avoid having to write device drivers from scratch, Arduino does save a bunch of time.

Will you tell me a bit about some of your applications?