

Arduino announces its first ARM-based prototyping board, the Arduino Due - ghalfacree
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/9/19/arduino-goes-arm-due-board/

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MatthewPhillips
Between Arduino and Raspberry Pi, are we approaching a point where a hardware
startup can bootstrap? There's a lot of room for disruption in the home
appliance sector that has been out of reach for the typical internet startup.
Think garage door openers, doorbells, anything in your house that currently
has a chip in it. Those companies are firmly entrenched in their way of doing
business.

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raphman
Building working prototypes is no longer a major problem. Nowadays,
(experienced) individuals can design portable game consoles [1], alarm clocks
[2], mobile phones [3], and pretty much everything else.

However, you need a lot of money, time and experience for manufacturing,
testing, shipping, and supporting the final products. Unlike software
startups, hw startups may need to apply for FCC and international
certifications, supervise contract manufacturers, and need to think carefully
about liability issues.

[1] <http://openpandora.org/> \- [2] <http://www.chumby.com/> \- [3]
<http://gta04.org/>

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Aren't those phase 2 problems though? As a simple test to see if a market
exists, why isn't it viable to sell your (polished) prototypes? One could
make, (just spitballing) a doorbell that sends you an email as a hobby
project, then throw it up on whatever the electronics equivalent of etsy is,
and build them on build-to-order basis for the first few hundred units and
then worry about investors only if your idea floats.

For the products we're talking about here, no competition exists. So I can
sell my gimmicky doorbell for $80 or $90 just to see if there's any interest
at all, then get investors and start building my own arduino boards from parts
(since the specs are open) at scale.

~~~
raphman
Actually, there are a number of online shops that you can ask to manufacture
and/or sell your design, e.g. [1,2].

However, manufacturing electronics in low quantities is quite expensive.
Additionally, in order to legally sell this stuff in the EU, you need to get a
WEEE certificate (i.e. someone needs to take care of recycling or disposing of
your product) and a CE certificate (compliance to all regulations). And you
cannot easily fix a bug in your board design or even the firmware, once the
product has been shipped to the customer. You have to get it right on the
first try.

I agree that it has become relatively easy to start a hardware company.
However, compared to a software startup, you need to invest a lot of money
upfront. And so much more can go wrong that you have little control over.

I don't know a lot about startup economics but I have closely followed the
fates of a number of hardware startups. For example, the Pandora guys got
screwed over by different manufacturers, costing them a lot of time, money,
and goodwill. WakeMate shipped dangerously defective USB chargers they had to
replace. OpenMoko just did not find enough potential buyers for their phones
(and screwed up in other ways).

Hardware startups do not fail because of a lack of prototyping tools.

[1] <http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/> [2] <http://www.sparkfun.com/>

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raphman
Hmm, I'm not sure whether an ARM board is really a good idea. For most
applications, a normal Arduino is easily sufficient. For anything more
complicated, you can buy an ARM board running Linux (e.g the upcoming
Raspberry Pi [1] for $25-$35).

Arduinos are primarily used for education and prototyping. Programming raw ARM
chips makes sense if you build a small series of specialized devices and want
to keep costs down.

Given that the Arduino Due will certainly cost significantly more than $30, I
see no market for such a board.

[1] <http://www.raspberrypi.org/>

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jmaygarden
There is a big difference between a Cortex-M3 and whatever is powering the
Raspberry Pi. It's intended as an 8-bit microcontroller replacement. I've
recently switched from TI MSP430 processors to this same Cortex-M3 from Atmel
and performance has increased while per unit cost has gone down.

~~~
raphman
Thanks for the clarification. Is there really much demand for such a board?

~~~
jmaygarden
I want one, and I know several others that will as well. The 32-bit Cortex-M3
core at 96 MHz leaves an AVR in the dust; it has low-power modes that make
power consumption comparable; and the peripheral set advantage of the
AT91SAM3U over an ATmega is huge.

Also, ARM Thumb2 is a much nicer instruction set than AVR in my humble
opinion. Cortex-M3 also has some great instructions to improve the efficiency
of real-time preemptive kernels (e.g. RBIT, CLZ and automatic pushing of
registers on interrupt). I've written my own tiny kernel for this
microcontroller, and I'll definitely be putting it up on github since this
release increases the likelihood that others will contribute to it.

Also, Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard (CMSIS) [1] makes
porting between vendor's offerings (e.g. STM32 or Stellaris) much easier than
going from say AVR to MSP430.

[1] [http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-m/cortex-
micro...](http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-m/cortex-
microcontroller-software-interface-standard.php)

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yardie
Have they finally fixed the pin header defect in their boards or is it
institutionalized at this point?

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mindcrime
Would you be kind enough to explain what the "pin header defect" is, for an
Arduino noob? I'm just starting to play around with Arduino hacking and
haven't heard of this yet (until now).

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raphman
The distance between the two rows of pin headers on each side is not a
multiple of 0.1". This means that every shield that you attach to the Arduino
needs to have this same strange spacing between the rows of pin headers. You
cannot just use a normal perfboard. As all Arduino shields have the same weird
spacing, fixing this design flaw would require everyone to buy new shields.
There are Arduino clones that add correctly aligned rows of pin headers [1],
however.

[1]
[http://shop.pinguino.cc/image/cache/data/olimex/pic32-otg-50...](http://shop.pinguino.cc/image/cache/data/olimex/pic32-otg-500x500.jpg)
(actually, no true Arduino clone)

 _Edit:_ found a good explanation with pictures here:
[http://brettbeauregard.com/blog/2009/07/arduino-offset-
heade...](http://brettbeauregard.com/blog/2009/07/arduino-offset-header/)

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rcfox
Couldn't they make an adapter?

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Pyrodogg
Apparently a someone does. <http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9374>

From raphman's link

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tomkinstinch
The 12-bit A/D is a step up.

Anyone know the projected unit cost for one of these? The processor alone is
~$10 (individually)

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jmaygarden
One can get that microcontroller around $5 a piece with larger quantities
(e.g. 10k). Also, the AT91SAM3U has a high-speed USB peripheral. So, the extra
circuitry for the serial-to-USB bridge is no longer necessary.

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jmaygarden
Has a schematic or block diagram been released for the Arduino Due? I haven't
found one with a quick search. I'd also be very interested to take a look at
the bootloader source code if that is available.

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nextparadigms
If this is the first ARM-based Arduino, what was the Arduino chip based on
that Google used at I/O for that accessory API thing? Was it a regular (but
smaller) Arduino?

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jmaygarden
All of the official Arduino hardware designs have used an AVR to the best of
my knowledge. Netduino [1] is a related project that runs a stripped down .NET
framework on an ARM7 core. However, that's not what Google used. It may be the
reference for Windows Phone add-ons.

[1] <http://netduino.com/>

