
Teagueduino 0.1: Arduino just got a whole lot easier - akumpf
http://labs.teague.com/?p=947
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jrockway
What about the opposite end of the spectrum? Say I'm comfortable with avr-gcc
and I took half of an electrical engineering major in college: what
environment and hardware should I use instead of Arduino?

(I've looked at the AVR stuff on sparkfun before, and it is expensive and
crappy compared to Arduino. I've built stuff with the Teensy. But I really
want the ability to cheaply "mass produce" if necessary, but don't want to
build everything myself.)

~~~
bigiain
If you want to use avr-gcc and emacs(or vi) & unix as your "environment",
there's nothing to stop you doing that and still using Arduino hardware - it's
just a ATmega328 on a board with a bunch of required/useful stuff (clock,
power regulator, usb, handy "breakput" pins...), which happens to have a
bootloader which you can ignore. If you're interested and capable of writing
your own gcc compiled executables into the chip, you can do so, and for some
of us, the ease of not having to "set up" the supporting hardware for the
microcontroller is a great advantage.

There are alternatives if your idea requires more "whatever" than an AT328 (or
a Mega2560) there are lots of other (perhaps less well known) options, but
consider using the Arduino hardware when it's suitable, even if you don't want
the "handholding" of the Arduino IDE. (Or, like me, let the ease of use that
"handholding" gives you allow you to significantly lower the bar of entry to
trying out random crazy ideas - I'll often grab an arduino and plug in some
sensors/leds/servos/whatever, and sit on the couch in the evening seeing is a
crazy idea is likely to work, rather than just thinking about it and never
trying anything out...)

~~~
bigiain
Heres a project I read about recently that uses a Parallax Propellor to get
high speed multi core computing out of a micro controller project - I'll
probably give one of these a whirl if/when I need more cpu horsepower than I
can get out of the regular line of Arduino hardware:

[http://scanlime.org/2011/04/spdif-digital-audio-on-a-
microco...](http://scanlime.org/2011/04/spdif-digital-audio-on-a-
microcontroller/)

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reustle
The universal connectors were inevitable. I love it. I really hope I can
override that dropdown based code editor though. What's the point if They need
to insert {'s and }'s anyway?

~~~
akumpf
It also supports keyboard navigation (which make writing code a bit faster
than just point-and-click dropdown), but I'm totally with you. We'll
definitely need to look into other input methods to speed things up as the
user gets comfortable with the syntax.

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devindotcom
Nice. This goes a long way towards making the platform accessible to real non-
coders, or kids even. I'm reposting this on CrunchGear, thanks for putting it
up.

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limmeau
Is this a reinvention of the PLC with nicer plugs?

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fleitz
Interesting, I wonder if it's possible to extend this to Netduino.

~~~
akumpf
I don't see why it wouldn't work. The protocol spec is listed in the post. You
just need to have enough EEPROM to store the instructions.

The Teagueduino code editor will try to communicate with whatever serial port
you specify, so if you're willing to build a realtime interpreter for Netduino
(actually much easier than it sounds) it should work just fine. Check out the
Teensy/Arduino firmware code (also in the post) as a starting point.

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mhb
Looks nice. Is it for sale?

~~~
akumpf
Not yet (we're looking into it).

The response from the community for Teagueduino has been great so far. Thanks!

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leon_
A little rant about the beginner's tutorials for the Arduino:

I'm trying (or was trying) to get into the Arduino/electronics stuff but by
far my biggest problem is not the super easy subset of C++ they use in their
IDE (hell, most of the time you don't need pointers) but the electronics
stuff.

Pushdown/Pullup/Voltage dividers, RC circuits, etc. All that fundamental
electronics stuff is never discussed in depth. They give you a circuit
schematic with let's say a voltage divider and a temperature sensor and tell
you: "That's the schematic and that's how you do it. That thing on the left is
called a voltage divider. It divides voltage. And now for the hard part: for-
loops and Serial.println()"

Is there no beginner stuff for people who know how to code but are puzzled by
the electronics part? Where they explain you why you have to put a voltage
divider into the circuit and what it exactly does.

Maybe I'm just ultra stupid and all the other people reading those tutorials
get an instant grasp of the circuits used and are really hold back by for-
loops and curly braces. Or my method is just wrong and I shouldn't try to
understand everything. Just copy circuits found on the internet and be happy?

(Yes, I'm reading electronics textbooks - sadly they are not that easy to
understand for casual learning on the weekends.)

~~~
timclark
What level are you looking at? Is the content of something like this
[http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=9780...](http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=9780596153748)
too simple?

~~~
leon_
I got my "enlightenment" some time ago - I think I understand now the very
basics of electronics. But my fundamental problem was to understand why
circuits were built the way they were.

Like the example of the thermic resistor used to measure room temperature. At
first I had no idea why the out line to the controller's pin had to be put
between 2 resistors (one being the sensor). The tutorial I followed mentioned
only that it's called a voltage divider - but that was it. (In hindsight this
is really a most basic concept - but at that time it was confusing to me.)

I read a few books on that subject since then but playing with
<http://www.falstad.com/circuit/> ultimately helped me the most.

I just wish there were some simple explanations of these concepts. (As simple
as explaining the basics of programming.)

~~~
timclark
I guess that the basic circuits should be documented in exactly the same way
as we would document basic code examples for beginners.

