Hardware Fun with the Arduino board [LWN.net]

Hardware Fun with the Arduino board

Posted Dec 20, 2007 22:46 UTC (Thu) by Quazatron (guest, #4368)
Parent article: Hardware Fun with the Arduino board

Arduinos are great. I bought a Boarduino from Adafruit (http://www.adafruit.com) and had a lot
of fun putting it together. It was the first PCB I ever soldered and it was so easy even I
could do it.
The code is very straightforward, it reminded me of the times I spent hacking away at my ZX
Spectrum's Z80 processor, you have complete control of the bare metal (minus the touchy power
supply and the tape loading errors).
The Arduino gives you a way to have your code interact with the Real World, by using sensors
or driving motors. I must admit I only did a couple of projects with it (a 5 LED PoV display
and playing Jingle Bells through a speaker), because Real Work seems to get in the way...

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Freeduino!!

Posted Jan 4, 2008 5:51 UTC (Fri) by HalfMoon (guest, #3211) [Link]

For that matter, you can just use avr-gcc and avrdude instead of the Arduino software environment. It's a completely reasonable AVR platform; comes with an ATmega168, soon upgradable to ATmega328p (32 KBytes flash for code). You can put your own RTOS on (I kind of like AvrX, under 2 KBytes) but it's just as easy to use "raw" unless you really need task switching. In case you've not used AVR micros before: you can fit a lot of code in just few KBytes. I often haven't neded even 4 KBytes...

Worth mentioning also is the www.Freeduino.org umbrella effort, the same idea (and default firmware!) as Arduino but cheaper and not constrained by the Arduino trademark. I like the moderndevice.com BBB; it's easy to breadboard with, and the reusable usb-serial cable is nice. ISTR it's the original idea from which Boarduino (one flavor of Freduino) and RBBB evolved. BBB hooks up directly to the power rails, and takes up less breadboard space. (Leaving more for me, w00t!)

If any of that interests you, one more tidbit: Atmel's AVR Dragon is essentially a $50 JTAG programmer/debugger you can use with the 6-pin ICSP connector. Debugging only from MS-Windows though (sigh); but programming works with avrdude from Linux. In any case, it's really hard to beat the bang-for-buck of these boards if you want a good place to start!