Sparkfun offering discounts on Arduino day

Sparkfun offering discounts on Arduino day(sparkfun.com)

66 points by erre 12 years ago | 33 comments

Eduardo3rd 12 years ago |

$3 for a micro controller as powerful as the Pro is absolutely insane. I remember paying 10x that price for some components for an early generation Arduino back in college 5 years ago. Eventually I'm sure that $3 will be the normal retail price for these boards, at which point I think we will start to see some amazingly disruptive disposable electronics emerge.

Isn't it great to live in the future?

ballooney 12 years ago | |

The arduino is really just a breakout board for a microcontroller made by Atmel, with a simplified development environment to lower the barrier to entry. The microcontroller chip itself has always been a couple of dollars, and was before the arduino was invented.

Really you could say that paying $20/board to break out a $2 chip was the insane bit (of course, if it makes the difference between you tinkering and not tinkering, totally worth it). It certainly hasn't been the cost of making arduinos that's been holding back your 'amazingly disruptive disposable electronics' - no chinese factory will have been paying more than a few cents in total parts costs for their mass-produced widgets of this sort for years now.

If you want garage-tinkering-friendly microcontrollers, can I tempt you with the newish NXP LPC810 [1]? It has a 32-bit core which can run at 30MHz (as compared to the 8-bit core running at about 16MHz on the arduino, iirc), and they're $1.37 in single units, less than 60 cents if you want 1000. ARM maintain a whole GNU toolchain [2] to develop on them - it couldn't be easier.

[1] http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/LPC810M021FN8FP/568...

[2] https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded

tdicola 12 years ago | | |

An Arduino is a little more complicated than a breakout for the ATmega. There's a power regulator so you can use any 6-12V supply, a USB to serial converter chip (FT232R), and various passive components to support the chip.

The LPC810 is neat, but very limited in flash memory and I/O. Check out the NXP LPC1114FN28--it's a 28 pin breadboard friendly DIP package ARM cortex M0: http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers/cortex_m0_m0/lp... 32k of flash and a similar amount of I/O as the ATmega328P used in an Arduino. The big advantage of ARM is that you can use free in circuit debugging tools like OpenOCD to debug and step through code in real time on the chip. It's not easy to do that on an Arduino without a $50+ adapter.

fnordfnordfnord 12 years ago | | |

It's not just the breakout. Microcontrollers like the AVR existed 20 years ago. You could get them and put them on a breadboard with a few components, and they would work, but you still had a lot more work to do before you could do anything with them. You'd have to build or buy a programmer, that was a task in and of itself (for a neophyte). IMO the thing that really sets Arduino apart from engineer/technically-proficient-hacker domain is the bootloader.

I like & use the LPC Expresso stuff too, but you can do a lot with an Arduino.

makomk 12 years ago | |

You can already get Chinese-made clones of the Pro Mini for less than $3, it's probably a good way to embed microcontrollers permanently in one-off projects.

danielweber 12 years ago |

As a n00b, what's the minimum I need to have to play with an Arduino? Will generally any Linux / Windows / Mac computer be able to run the software and connecting hardware I need to program it?

Yhippa 12 years ago |

Any recommendations for what to get if you're looking to get into developing on the Arduino?

coreymgilmore 12 years ago | |

Uno R3 is your best bet. Simple to use and is the basis for most projects. Plus, it has USB for communication while some other boards don't.

127001brewer 12 years ago | | |

What about the "RedBoard" (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11575)?

chewmieser 12 years ago | |

I'd grab an uno. Great starter board.

austinz 12 years ago |

Is there a toolchain I can use to compile and load plain C onto Arduino boards? I'm not too familiar with the development environment, although I'd like to try some stuff out with the hardware I have.

kh_hk 12 years ago | |

    Q: Can I use an Arduino board without the Arduino software?
    A: Sure. It's just an AVR development board, you can use straight AVR C or
       C++ (with avr-gcc and avrdude or AVR Studio) to program it.

    From: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/FAQ

As a side note, if you are feeling fancy, you can build your own firmware based on LUFA and load them into the Atmega chip the boards have as an USB-to-serial converter. That opens a world for pretty cool hacks too.

austinz 12 years ago | | |

Excellent! Thanks a lot.

bradyd 12 years ago | |

I haven't personally done this yet, so I'm not sure if there is more to it, but there is a program called AVRDUDE[1], used to load the firmware onto the boards. I know that the Arduino IDE uses this behind the scenes. I'm not really sure about the compilers involved. Basically the Ardunio environment is just the toolchain and a bootloader. I know that there are a few different bootloaders around for the Adrduino compatible chips (such as the Adafruit "No-wait" bootloader[2]) to look for inspiration.

[1] http://www.nongnu.org/avrdude/ [2] http://learn.adafruit.com/arduino-tips-tricks-and-techniques...

Thrymr 12 years ago | | |

The compiler is just avr-gcc, you can use that and upload code with avrdude directly, bypassing (or even overwriting) the bootloader. You don't even need an Arduino, with the right breakout board and serial connection you can write directly to a naked microcontroller.

warfangle 12 years ago | |

There's the official arduino command line tool: https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/blob/ide-1.5.x/build/shar...

But you need to use their (terrible) IDE for writing your sketches this way.

You can also use avr dude; there's a sample makefile available here: http://playground.arduino.cc/Learning/CommandLine#.UzQ_ca1kF...

tmuir 12 years ago | |

WinAVR is the windows suite. Compiler, Debugger, and Programmer compatible with the bootloader already on the Arduino.

tomswartz07 12 years ago |

I have an old R1 Uno, and I've always been interested in the smaller form factor devices.

How exactly are the devices like the Pro and Mini programmed? I've never been able to get a straight answer.

kruffin 12 years ago | |

You use a breakout board to get the connector you need to hook it up to your computer. So for the 5v mini you would get something like this: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9716

You then either solder on some headers and connect it to the breakout, program it, and then disconnect it when done or do some funky alligator clip madness to connect the breakout to the arduino.

Note that the pro already has the pins waiting for the breakout to be connected.

lsiebert 12 years ago |

You can get a uno clone from China for 9-10 us plus free Shipping.

antonio0 12 years ago |

US only?

erre 12 years ago | |

I don't see anything on that page that suggests it's US-only. Generally speaking, Sparkfun delivers internationally: https://www.sparkfun.com/static/customer_service#ShippingPol...

Q: Can I use an Arduino board without the Arduino software? A: Sure. It's just an AVR development board, you can use straight AVR C or C++ (with avr-gcc and avrdude or AVR Studio) to program it. From: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/FAQ