

Arduino Zero Pro released - Tomte
http://www.arduino.org/products/arduino-zero-pro

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neomech
Interestingly this isn't on the official arduino.cc site, but rather the
"other" arduino site.

more info here: [https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150217/10345530055/is-
ar...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150217/10345530055/is-arduino-
heading-towards-first-open-hardware-fork.shtml)

~~~
meragrin
It seems to be there now. Not sure why one is pro and the other one not.

[http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardZero](http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardZero)

~~~
Tomte
That has been there for some time now. In the board overview you'll find it
listed as coming soon.

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ChuckMcM
Nice, I've been surprised the ATMega chips have lasted as long as they have
given how much more powerful ARM Cortex-M chips are, and they are about the
same price. For sp332 there are three "general" groups of the Cortex M series,

M0/M0+/M1/M2 - ARMv6 - basic peripherals

M3/M4 - ARMv7 - optional floating point

M7 - Basically everything on steroids

I find the M4 feels like a sort of blend between the 80286 and the 68010.

~~~
rasz_pl
What do you mean by your last sentence? Looking at simplest benchmark -
Dhrystones both 286 and 68000 reach ~2K. Arm M3 does ~1K _per MHz_, M4
1.2/mhz.

We are talking Pentium 100MHz performance out of Arm M4 150-200MHz (freescale
150/st 168/nxp 204 MHz). Even <$2 STM32F103 (72MHz) is faster than Intel DX4
100MHz.

16MHz Atmels lasted so long only due to Arduino :/

~~~
ChuckMcM

       > What do you mean by your last sentence?
    

From a programming model perspective. Granted pure performance is higher. The
programming model though of a 'large' address space, modest memory protections
(not remamping but some execution protection etc, a simple 'user' and 'kernel'
mode, and modest I/O channel bandwidth.

~~~
rasz_pl
I love flat address space, its perfect for embedded. As for IO its not that
grim once you go up to fatter chips (STM32F42*). FSMC, high speed usb, 100mbit
ethernet, dedicated camera/LCD interfaces, high speed GPIO with dma. Super
cheap STM32F1xx does about 7MB/s over GPIO, almost ISA speed.

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danellis
I don't know how much this thing will cost, but you can get any ST Nucleo
board (up to Cortex-M4, detachable ST-Link programmer/debugger and headers for
all I/O, including Arduino headers) for $10. Hard to beat that.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Yup, the Nucleo F411RE is my current go-to board for starting a new project
($10.44 in singles from Digikey with both an 'Arduino compatible' connector on
the top and a bunch of other I/O from the chip on the 'outer' connectors.

~~~
danellis
> the Nucleo F411RE is my current go-to board for starting a new project

Well stop it! Distributors keep running out of that one when I want one.

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KamiCrit
It's too bad there is no ATMega chip to pull off and plug into a bread board.

I liked the idea of using the Arduino as a programming centre. Put the chip
into a project and then grab another chip to program for the next project.

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tdicola
You won't find many powerful ARM chips that are in a DIP package. There are a
couple from NXP (like the LPC810: [https://learn.adafruit.com/getting-started-
with-the-lpc810/i...](https://learn.adafruit.com/getting-started-with-the-
lpc810/introduction)), but otherwise it's just not worth the chip
manufacturers time to build something that would have such low demand
(relative to all the other stuff they make).

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sp332
Why must ARM have the most confusing part names? Where does the M0 fall in
their lineup?

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Tomte
There are several Cortex chips.

Cortex A (with rather high numbers) are relatively high performance chips,
commonly found in one board computers, something like the BeagleBoard.

Cortex M are microcontrollers for embedded usage, slower clocks, but geared
towards periphery like CAN, SPI, I2C etc. You can find a lot of those in
industrial use.

Cortex R are less common, I think they are geared towards automotive, for
real-time stuff, although -M is also used for that.

Above all those sit those big ARM9/ARM11 chips.

Within the M family there are 0 for relatively tiny footprint, 1 is special
(synthesized into your FPGA), 3 is the "normal" one, and 4 has DSP
capabilities and a bit more performance.

~~~
Matthias247
Some more info:

A stands for application. These chips are full featured processors which are
runnning big operating systems (e.g. Linux)

M is microcontroller. These are running either with no operating system or
with a lightweight realtime operating system (e.g. freertos)

R is realtime. These are probably the most niche controllers and are used for
things with realtime constraints. Besides automotive safety you can also find
them used as SSD controllers.

~~~
Someone
What makes a chip realtime? I thought that was more a feature of the code
running on a chip than of the chip itself (for 'normal' designs)

The only feature I can think of there is 'no support for demand-paged virtual
memory', but even that isn't strictly needed for a real-time system.

~~~
unwind
The official Cortex-R page lists three main items:

    
    
        - Fast, bounded and deterministic interrupt response
        - Tightly Coupled Memories (TCM) local to the processor for fast-responding
          code/data
        - Low-Latency Interrupt Mode (LLIM) to accelerate interrupt entry
    

I haven't cross-compared the relevant features to the Cortex-M cores, but the
M cores are certainly more common and definitely perform well too.

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ceequof
3.3V, like the Due, that's unfortunate. This means it won't be compatible with
most of the Uno shields, or 90% of the sensors on the market.

Kinda wish Arduino had gone with something with wireless stuff built in, like
the Linkit One or RFduino.

~~~
danellis
> This means it won't be compatible with ... 90% of the sensors on the market

Are you sure about that? 3.3v is extremely common in the industry, to the
extent that a lot of hobbyist 5v stuff has to be level shifted.

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sjtrny
I'm not sure why anyone would buy an Arduino considering products like Teensy
3.1 or Maple. Maybe the slightly lower cost is what is keeping Arduino alive.

~~~
Tomte
Good enough. Everyone has exactly this board. I don't have to worry about
whether the compatibility promises carry some footnotes with them.

Arduino is about having a common baseline. People who are more experienced can
"upgrade" to other boards.

~~~
Jack000
don't forget the community and libraries you can leverage. Personally I'm
still using arduino for the excellent acelstepper library.

~~~
sjtrny
Teensy and Maple are software compatible with Arduino.

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0xffff2
So the stripped down little brother of the Due, which has been around for some
time?

I don't see price mentioned. Hopefully it's proportionally cheaper as well.

~~~
ansible
It can't be too crazy expensive, there's not a lot of expensive parts on the
board.

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olivierkaisin
Special mention goes to the 32KB of SRM, the 12bit ADC and the analog outputs.
Love it!

~~~
rasz_pl
yes, its 'almost' as good as $5 chinese ARM M3 Maple clones

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/STM32F103C8T6-ARM-STM32-Minimum-
Syst...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/STM32F103C8T6-ARM-STM32-Minimum-System-
Development-Board-Module-For-Arduino-DHUS-/321569700934)

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Hot-Sold-New-STM32-ARM-
Cortex-M3-Lea...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Hot-Sold-New-STM32-ARM-
Cortex-M3-Leaflabs-Leaf-Maple-Mini-Module-For-Arduino-/311248450407)

~~~
swamp40
So frustrating that here in the US, you can't even buy those individual
components for that price, even if you buy them on reels.

I'm not sure if it's the distributor's profit margins, counterfeit parts,
yuan-to-dollar advantages, or what.

Probably a combination of all that and more.

I doubt the STM32F103 is a knockoff though.

And they cost over $3 here in the US even on reels of 2400 pieces.

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swamp40
Arduino team(s?): Atmel now has an L21, a lower power version of the D21.

Should drop right in.

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johnchristopher
Why is there no USB port ?

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Sevzi
256K of flash? They must have to try to get chips that small. Is it an
addressing problem?

~~~
marssaxman
They are talking about the flash memory built into the microcontroller itself,
not about external flash storage. Generally this stores the device's firmware.
256K is a completely reasonable size for this class of microcontroller.

~~~
Sevzi
So it's, what, 180nm?

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marssaxman
No idea. Can't recall ever hearing anyone discuss the fab processes used for
microcontrollers; people only really care about that in the high end PC world.

edit: here's Atmel's page with the mcu specs, if you're curious:
[http://www.atmel.com/devices/ATSAMD21G18A.aspx](http://www.atmel.com/devices/ATSAMD21G18A.aspx)

