Arduino choices

I

Ivan Vegvary

Guest
Want to buy an Arduino. Too many choices that I don't understand. Prices all seem to be nearly the same.

Arduino will be used by a small group of high school students to build a "pick and place" robotics arm. School has a 3D printer and a laser cutter. We also have lots of motors and servos from VEX robotics kits. We could use the VEX controllers but I would like the students to learn an "open source" platform. Process will included sketching, designing parts using Auto Cad Inventor, printing the base, arms, knuckles, motor supports, gears, etc. with the 3D printers, winding a coil to create an electro-magnet as the pick up. Goal will be to autonomously and with joy sticks pick and place small metal discs.

Anyway, could some of you point me as to what flavor or version of Arduino to purchase. Also what tutorials (books) would you recommend.

Thanks,
Ivan Vegvary
 
On 23/10/2012 11:46 AM, Ivan Vegvary wrote:
Want to buy an Arduino. Too many choices that I don't understand. Prices all seem to be nearly the same.

Arduino will be used by a small group of high school students to build a "pick and place" robotics arm. School has a 3D printer and a laser cutter. We also have lots of motors and servos from VEX robotics kits. We could use the VEX controllers but I would like the students to learn an "open source" platform. Process will included sketching, designing parts using Auto Cad Inventor, printing the base, arms, knuckles, motor supports, gears, etc. with the 3D printers, winding a coil to create an electro-magnet as the pick up. Goal will be to autonomously and with joy sticks pick and place small metal discs.

Anyway, could some of you point me as to what flavor or version of Arduino to purchase. Also what tutorials (books) would you recommend.

Thanks,
Ivan Vegvary

You should be able to get all the info you need from the Arduino Web
site. It might be the most interesting for the students to build their
own "Arduino" by mounting an Atmel Mega 328 chip and xtal on some vero
board or similar (Look for "bare bones Arduino").
If you will need a lot of inputs and outputs perhaps the Atmel Mega 1280
would be a better choice but it comes as a surface mount chip so it's
more practical to buy those as a completed board.
I find the "Arduino Cookbook" by Argolis to cover all one might need to
get started and more !!

Cheers ........ Rheilly P
 
On Monday, October 22, 2012 8:46:51 PM UTC-7, Ivan Vegvary wrote:
Want to buy an Arduino. Too many choices that I don't understand. Prices all seem to be nearly the same.



Arduino will be used by a small group of high school students to build a "pick and place" robotics arm. School has a 3D printer and a laser cutter. We also have lots of motors and servos from VEX robotics kits. We could use the VEX controllers but I would like the students to learn an "open source" platform. Process will included sketching, designing parts using Auto Cad Inventor, printing the base, arms, knuckles, motor supports, gears, etc. with the 3D printers, winding a coil to create an electro-magnet as the pick up. Goal will be to autonomously and with joy sticks pick and place small metal discs.



Anyway, could some of you point me as to what flavor or version of Arduino to purchase. Also what tutorials (books) would you recommend.



Thanks,

Ivan Vegvary
Thanks everybody, will go with the UNO. Already ordered it. Great group!!!!
 
On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 10:00:36 PM UTC+2, Phil Hobbs wrote:
The Arduino IDE doesn't do it, but it's

possible.

That's the point I was making. The Arduino hardware doesn't do it either.
It's all done via the reset pin so it's difficult
for any hardware to NOT support it...you'd have
to snip the pin off the chip.
 
On 10/24/2012 08:22 AM, fungus wrote:
On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 10:00:36 PM UTC+2, Phil Hobbs wrote:

The Arduino IDE doesn't do it, but it's

possible.

That's the point I was making. The Arduino hardware doesn't do it either.


It's all done via the reset pin so it's difficult
for any hardware to NOT support it...you'd have
to snip the pin off the chip.

I know how it's done--I've designed several ATmega gizmos in the last
couple of years, one of which used a bidirectional level shifter on the
reset pin. There's even an ISP header on the Arduino Uno board.

Since the Arduino development system doesn't support ISP, though, you
have to go through all the pain of porting the library over to an
Eclipse project, and once you've done that, what's the point of the
Arduino-specific stuff anyway? You might as well save the code space
used by the bootloader.

Having a standard interface pinout is nice and all, but the lack of
source-level debugging really makes it more of a toy.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs


--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
 
On 10/23/12 1:00 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 10/23/2012 02:35 PM, fungus wrote:
On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 4:32:59 PM UTC+2, Phil Hobbs wrote:


One thing to remember is that Arduino gets harder to use the bigger the

program is, because there's no in-circuit debugging: you have to use

burn-and-crash.


Yes there is...all the recent Atmel chips have
"debugWIRE" debugging

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DebugWIRE

The Arduino IDE doesn't do it, but it's
possible.

That's the point I was making. The Arduino hardware doesn't do it either.
Yes it does. Arduino at its core is an ATMega328. Anything that chip
supports, you can make Arduino do.
 
On Wednesday, October 24, 2012 8:28:09 PM UTC+2, Phil Hobbs wrote:
Since the Arduino development system doesn't
support ISP, though, you ...

Arduino does ISP programming since v1.0.
I use it all the time to program bare AVR
chips on breadboards.
 
On 10/25/2012 04:15 AM, fungus wrote:
On Wednesday, October 24, 2012 8:28:09 PM UTC+2, Phil Hobbs wrote:

Since the Arduino development system doesn't
support ISP, though, you ...


Arduino does ISP programming since v1.0.
I use it all the time to program bare AVR
chips on breadboards.
It has an ISP header, yes. Which works fine with Eclipse, yes. Which
requires you to port the entire Arduino library to an Eclipse project, yuck.

Arduino is a toy.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
 
On 10/24/2012 11:37 PM, Daniel Pitts wrote:
On 10/23/12 1:00 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 10/23/2012 02:35 PM, fungus wrote:
On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 4:32:59 PM UTC+2, Phil Hobbs wrote:


One thing to remember is that Arduino gets harder to use the bigger the

program is, because there's no in-circuit debugging: you have to use

burn-and-crash.


Yes there is...all the recent Atmel chips have
"debugWIRE" debugging

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DebugWIRE

The Arduino IDE doesn't do it, but it's
possible.

That's the point I was making. The Arduino hardware doesn't do it either.
Yes it does. Arduino at its core is an ATMega328. Anything that chip
supports, you can make Arduino do.
If you polish it and apply a metal coating, you can use it as a make-up
mirror too.

I've done several ATMega-based gizmos in the last couple of years, as I
said already in this thread, so I'm familiar with both approaches.

From a hardware/software hacker POV, Arduino is a nice library and a
set of standard interface pinouts, plus a stone-age development system.
A serial port and blinkenlights? In 2012? You've got to be kidding
me. They give away far more powerful tools than that for free, and
what's more, I can use them on any processor family I like, rather than
being limited to ATmegas.

I'm all for open-source hardware in its place, but for instrument
development work, the lack of source-level hardware debug makes Arduino
completely unsuitable. (Most of my stuff is sufficiently specialized
that it wouldn't be of much interest to a very wide audience, so OSH
doesn't come up much for me.)

My son interned with me this summer, learning how to build gizmos and
write firmware. He started with Arduino, and then a barefoot ATmega
board he built himself, switching to AVR Studio with a sigh of relief,
although he did miss the nice Arduino library.

He wound up using the Eclipse-based LPCxpresso system for ARM Cortex
M3s, which cost $30 all-up, and is a 120-MHz 32-bit processor with
hardware divides and deterministic 12-cycle interrupts. It implements a
full JTAG debug probe as well, so you can use the same h/w to develop
stand-alone products.

It was a lot for a beginner to handle, but he got there eventually, and
was able to prototype a reasonable chunk of the self-calibration code
for an instrument. (It'll have to be rewritten some to reach a
commercial standard, of course, but the final version will still owe a
lot to his work.)

So IMO Arduino is great for sufficiently small projects, where having
the community support, shield boards, and the nice library outweigh the
1990 development system, and where the GPL v2 restrictions aren't
important. I doubt very much that I'll use it again myself.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs


--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
 
Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 10/24/2012 11:37 PM, Daniel Pitts wrote:
On 10/23/12 1:00 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 10/23/2012 02:35 PM, fungus wrote:
On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 4:32:59 PM UTC+2, Phil Hobbs wrote:


One thing to remember is that Arduino gets harder to use the bigger the

program is, because there's no in-circuit debugging: you have to use

burn-and-crash.


Yes there is...all the recent Atmel chips have
"debugWIRE" debugging

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DebugWIRE

The Arduino IDE doesn't do it, but it's
possible.

That's the point I was making. The Arduino hardware doesn't do it either.
Yes it does. Arduino at its core is an ATMega328. Anything that chip
supports, you can make Arduino do.

If you polish it and apply a metal coating, you can use it as a make-up
mirror too.

I've done several ATMega-based gizmos in the last couple of years, as I
said already in this thread, so I'm familiar with both approaches.

From a hardware/software hacker POV, Arduino is a nice library and a
set of standard interface pinouts, plus a stone-age development system.
A serial port and blinkenlights? In 2012? You've got to be kidding
me. They give away far more powerful tools than that for free, and
what's more, I can use them on any processor family I like, rather than
being limited to ATmegas.

I'm all for open-source hardware in its place, but for instrument
development work, the lack of source-level hardware debug makes Arduino
completely unsuitable. (Most of my stuff is sufficiently specialized
that it wouldn't be of much interest to a very wide audience, so OSH
doesn't come up much for me.)

My son interned with me this summer, learning how to build gizmos and
write firmware. He started with Arduino, and then a barefoot ATmega
board he built himself, switching to AVR Studio with a sigh of relief,
although he did miss the nice Arduino library.

He wound up using the Eclipse-based LPCxpresso system for ARM Cortex
M3s, which cost $30 all-up, and is a 120-MHz 32-bit processor with
hardware divides and deterministic 12-cycle interrupts. It implements a
full JTAG debug probe as well, so you can use the same h/w to develop
stand-alone products.

It was a lot for a beginner to handle, but he got there eventually, and
was able to prototype a reasonable chunk of the self-calibration code
for an instrument. (It'll have to be rewritten some to reach a
commercial standard, of course, but the final version will still owe a
lot to his work.)

So IMO Arduino is great for sufficiently small projects, where having
the community support, shield boards, and the nice library outweigh the
1990 development system, and where the GPL v2 restrictions aren't
important. I doubt very much that I'll use it again myself.

I bought these boards, for a couple Atmel based projects:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/130624578604

http://www.ebay.com/itm/180954538494
 
On 10/25/12 9:01 AM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 10/24/2012 11:37 PM, Daniel Pitts wrote:
On 10/23/12 1:00 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 10/23/2012 02:35 PM, fungus wrote:
On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 4:32:59 PM UTC+2, Phil Hobbs wrote:


One thing to remember is that Arduino gets harder to use the bigger
the

program is, because there's no in-circuit debugging: you have to use

burn-and-crash.


Yes there is...all the recent Atmel chips have
"debugWIRE" debugging

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DebugWIRE

The Arduino IDE doesn't do it, but it's
possible.

That's the point I was making. The Arduino hardware doesn't do it
either.
Yes it does. Arduino at its core is an ATMega328. Anything that chip
supports, you can make Arduino do.

If you polish it and apply a metal coating, you can use it as a make-up
mirror too.
[snip irrelevant discussion]

Yes, the point I was making, however, was that Arduino hardware does
indeed support debugWIRE, contrary to your claim. None of the other
points you made after that change that fact, even if they are otherwise
valid and useful points.
 
On Thursday, October 25, 2012 6:01:51 PM UTC+2, Phil Hobbs wrote:
So IMO Arduino is great for sufficiently small projects, where having
the community support, shield boards, and the nice library outweigh the
1990 development system, and where the GPL v2 restrictions aren't
important. I doubt very much that I'll use it again myself.
You won't get any argument about the Arduino
IDE being rubbish for debugging.

It's unlikely to change though. Writing a
source-level debugger is HARD and I don't
think there's anybody out there with enough
motivation/resources to do it.

The Arduino people seem to be concentrating
more on libraries for common hardware which
are easy for inexperienced people to use.
 
On 10/26/12 4:36 AM, fungus wrote:
On Thursday, October 25, 2012 6:01:51 PM UTC+2, Phil Hobbs wrote:

So IMO Arduino is great for sufficiently small projects, where having
the community support, shield boards, and the nice library outweigh the
1990 development system, and where the GPL v2 restrictions aren't
important. I doubt very much that I'll use it again myself.


You won't get any argument about the Arduino
IDE being rubbish for debugging.

It's unlikely to change though. Writing a
source-level debugger is HARD and I don't
think there's anybody out there with enough
motivation/resources to do it.

The Arduino people seem to be concentrating
more on libraries for common hardware which
are easy for inexperienced people to use.

Which seems unfortunate to me. Wiring seems useful for beginners, but
it doesn't seem like it was really designed with portability in mind.
It also doesn't build up abstractions, but simply creates a high level
abstraction. I could easily see several mid-level abstractions that
could have been created, so that more advanced programmers could create
different high-level abstractions easily.

Then again, I haven't actually done what they've done, so who am I to
judge ;-) I do appreciate Arduino, for without them, I probably
wouldn't have embarked on my journey into Digital Electronics
exploration the way that I have.
 
On 10/25/2012 01:42 PM, Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Phil Hobbs wrote:

On 10/24/2012 11:37 PM, Daniel Pitts wrote:
On 10/23/12 1:00 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 10/23/2012 02:35 PM, fungus wrote:
On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 4:32:59 PM UTC+2, Phil Hobbs wrote:


One thing to remember is that Arduino gets harder to use the bigger the

program is, because there's no in-circuit debugging: you have to use

burn-and-crash.


Yes there is...all the recent Atmel chips have
"debugWIRE" debugging

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DebugWIRE

The Arduino IDE doesn't do it, but it's
possible.

That's the point I was making. The Arduino hardware doesn't do it either.
Yes it does. Arduino at its core is an ATMega328. Anything that chip
supports, you can make Arduino do.

If you polish it and apply a metal coating, you can use it as a make-up
mirror too.

I've done several ATMega-based gizmos in the last couple of years, as I
said already in this thread, so I'm familiar with both approaches.

From a hardware/software hacker POV, Arduino is a nice library and a
set of standard interface pinouts, plus a stone-age development system.
A serial port and blinkenlights? In 2012? You've got to be kidding
me. They give away far more powerful tools than that for free, and
what's more, I can use them on any processor family I like, rather than
being limited to ATmegas.

I'm all for open-source hardware in its place, but for instrument
development work, the lack of source-level hardware debug makes Arduino
completely unsuitable. (Most of my stuff is sufficiently specialized
that it wouldn't be of much interest to a very wide audience, so OSH
doesn't come up much for me.)

My son interned with me this summer, learning how to build gizmos and
write firmware. He started with Arduino, and then a barefoot ATmega
board he built himself, switching to AVR Studio with a sigh of relief,
although he did miss the nice Arduino library.

He wound up using the Eclipse-based LPCxpresso system for ARM Cortex
M3s, which cost $30 all-up, and is a 120-MHz 32-bit processor with
hardware divides and deterministic 12-cycle interrupts. It implements a
full JTAG debug probe as well, so you can use the same h/w to develop
stand-alone products.

It was a lot for a beginner to handle, but he got there eventually, and
was able to prototype a reasonable chunk of the self-calibration code
for an instrument. (It'll have to be rewritten some to reach a
commercial standard, of course, but the final version will still owe a
lot to his work.)

So IMO Arduino is great for sufficiently small projects, where having
the community support, shield boards, and the nice library outweigh the
1990 development system, and where the GPL v2 restrictions aren't
important. I doubt very much that I'll use it again myself.


I bought these boards, for a couple Atmel based projects:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/130624578604

http://www.ebay.com/itm/180954538494
Wow, $5. Pretty tough to make a living at that rate!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
 
On 10/26/2012 07:36 AM, fungus wrote:
On Thursday, October 25, 2012 6:01:51 PM UTC+2, Phil Hobbs wrote:

So IMO Arduino is great for sufficiently small projects, where having
the community support, shield boards, and the nice library outweigh the
1990 development system, and where the GPL v2 restrictions aren't
important. I doubt very much that I'll use it again myself.


You won't get any argument about the Arduino
IDE being rubbish for debugging.

It's unlikely to change though. Writing a
source-level debugger is HARD and I don't
think there's anybody out there with enough
motivation/resources to do it.

The Arduino people seem to be concentrating
more on libraries for common hardware which
are easy for inexperienced people to use.
But they don't need to write one, any more than they needed to write
their own compiler from scratch (which is a bigger project than a
debugger). What I don't understand is the lack of gdb/Eclipse support,
or even a project for AVR Studio. The Dragon board is okay for light
duty use, for instance, and costs $50.

It's a pity, because the Arduino library has a lot of nice features, but
not enough for me to want to take on the porting job.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
 
Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 10/26/2012 07:36 AM, fungus wrote:
On Thursday, October 25, 2012 6:01:51 PM UTC+2, Phil Hobbs wrote:

So IMO Arduino is great for sufficiently small projects, where having
the community support, shield boards, and the nice library outweigh the
1990 development system, and where the GPL v2 restrictions aren't
important. I doubt very much that I'll use it again myself.


You won't get any argument about the Arduino
IDE being rubbish for debugging.

It's unlikely to change though. Writing a
source-level debugger is HARD and I don't
think there's anybody out there with enough
motivation/resources to do it.

The Arduino people seem to be concentrating
more on libraries for common hardware which
are easy for inexperienced people to use.


But they don't need to write one, any more than they needed to write
their own compiler from scratch (which is a bigger project than a
debugger). What I don't understand is the lack of gdb/Eclipse support,
or even a project for AVR Studio. The Dragon board is okay for light
duty use, for instance, and costs $50.

It's a pity, because the Arduino library has a lot of nice features, but
not enough for me to want to take on the porting job.

The Arduino scripts are in C. They are compiled & uploaded to the
board. What does the Eclipse use?
 
Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 10/25/2012 01:42 PM, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

I bought these boards, for a couple Atmel based projects:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/130624578604

http://www.ebay.com/itm/180954538494

Wow, $5. Pretty tough to make a living at that rate!

I plan to use one of them in the custom soldering station I'm
building.

of course, it's a classic Catch-22 situation. I need better
soldering irons to assemble the soldering station. I bought a 150W
adjustable up converter (Up to 30 V output) to use one of the new irons
to build it. :)
 
On 10/26/2012 01:33 PM, Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Phil Hobbs wrote:

On 10/26/2012 07:36 AM, fungus wrote:
On Thursday, October 25, 2012 6:01:51 PM UTC+2, Phil Hobbs wrote:

So IMO Arduino is great for sufficiently small projects, where having
the community support, shield boards, and the nice library outweigh the
1990 development system, and where the GPL v2 restrictions aren't
important. I doubt very much that I'll use it again myself.


You won't get any argument about the Arduino
IDE being rubbish for debugging.

It's unlikely to change though. Writing a
source-level debugger is HARD and I don't
think there's anybody out there with enough
motivation/resources to do it.

The Arduino people seem to be concentrating
more on libraries for common hardware which
are easy for inexperienced people to use.


But they don't need to write one, any more than they needed to write
their own compiler from scratch (which is a bigger project than a
debugger). What I don't understand is the lack of gdb/Eclipse support,
or even a project for AVR Studio. The Dragon board is okay for light
duty use, for instance, and costs $50.

It's a pity, because the Arduino library has a lot of nice features, but
not enough for me to want to take on the porting job.


The Arduino scripts are in C. They are compiled& uploaded to the
board. What does the Eclipse use?
Arduino uses a sort of bastardized C++, but you can usually ignore the
differences. Eclipse is an open-source IDE that has plugins for C, C++,
Java, and most of the languages-du-jour, as well as a bunch of other
things. The debugger is gdb, which isn't very good, but nearly everyone
uses it because it's free, ubiquitous, and pretty well supported.

There's a non-GDB open-source debugger project called ZeroBugs, which I
quite like, but it was written by one guy who now has a day job and
can't support it very well. It's streets ahead of the usual linux
debuggers, but not as good as the Visual Studio one, let alone the IBM
VisualAge one (which was the gold standard, RIP).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
 
George Herold wrote:
On Oct 26, 1:37 pm, "Michael A. Terrell" <mike.terr...@earthlink.net
wrote:
Phil Hobbs wrote:

On 10/25/2012 01:42 PM, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

I bought these boards, for a couple Atmel based projects:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/130624578604

http://www.ebay.com/itm/180954538494

Wow, $5. Pretty tough to make a living at that rate!

I plan to use one of them in the custom soldering station I'm
building.

of course, it's a classic Catch-22 situation. I need better
soldering irons to assemble the soldering station. I bought a 150W
adjustable up converter (Up to 30 V output) to use one of the new irons
to build it. :)

Well at least it's better than having to build the lathe to turn the
screw, that...

(EE Smith, "Skylark of Space" (?))

I'm trying to get a damaged Atlas lathe that's about 40 years old.
Another Catch-22. If it was working, I could make replacement parts. :(
 
On Oct 26, 1:37 pm, "Michael A. Terrell" <mike.terr...@earthlink.net>
wrote:
Phil Hobbs wrote:

On 10/25/2012 01:42 PM, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

    I bought these boards, for a couple Atmel based projects:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/130624578604

http://www.ebay.com/itm/180954538494

Wow, $5.  Pretty tough to make a living at that rate!

   I plan to use one of them in the custom soldering station I'm
building.

   of course, it's a classic Catch-22 situation.  I need better
soldering irons to assemble the soldering station.  I bought a 150W
adjustable up converter (Up to 30 V output) to use one of the new irons
to build it. :)
Well at least it's better than having to build the lathe to turn the
screw, that...

(EE Smith, "Skylark of Space" (?))

George H.
 

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