

Teensy++ $24 AVR board, USB, 63/4/2KiB flash/RAM/EEPROM, 46 I/O, 8 analo., 9 PWM - ralph
http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/?not_a_duplicate

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jws
A very nice development. I like the AT90USB162 for its native USB interface
(no serial unless you build it). I find this makes the code for host
communication cleaner as it dispenses with serial parsing and all the error
handling that comes with it. The lack of analog inputs hurts on the '162. Even
for nominally digital applications, I find it handy to use the analog inputs
for things like instrumenting currents and secondary voltages.

For the folks mystified by Arduino popularity this may be your preferred
solution (lower cost, more capability). My personal opinion is that Arduino is
not popular because of the hardware or software, but because of the culture.
It is deliberately kept accessible to people that don't know fancy words like
"data direction register". You can look at the examples, do a little copy and
paste, make some breadboard connections and build that special little object
that you thought should exist.

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dan_the_welder
Absolutely right. The culture of helping out, code sharing and support cottage
industries are making the Arduino a winner.

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ralph
It's predecessor, the Teensy, has been discussed before;
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=457740> But this is the Teensy++, despite
having the same URL, hence me fudging the lameness filter. You get quite a bit
more for a small price increase so it's well worth another look.

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tybris
Got the first one. Really fun to play with. (Using it to build robots that
drive around and communicate over an accoustic network)

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pingswept
I'd love to hear more about your acoustic networking if you've got time to
tell.

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tybris
Basically, I didn't want to spend money on wireless network chips and figured
I could use the speaker+mic I was using for distance measurements for sending
small bits of data too. It currently uses TDMA with 1 second time slots
subdivided into 8 bits with sound being 1, and silence 0. The stunning 1
byte/s is good enough for me at this point. Embarassingly, they're still wired
together to synchronize time. I'm mostly working on processing the sound to
reduce interference (especially the motor noise). They can make a pretty
reasonable guess at frequency, but it is getting hard to fit in the Teensy's
memory. Maybe I'll get the new one.

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maximilian
As cool as it is to be sending data over sound, its only $25 for some of the
cheaper wireless modules over at sparkfun:
<http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/categories.php?c=16> That would be
impossibly more practical, and you wouldn't really have to have them wired
together to sync them. You could have a master transmitter that sends out a
sync bit that everyone syncs with (or something...).

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ERG
Can someone give me a sense of some projects you can do with a Teensy? I've
never played around with programming chips like this before but sounds pretty
cool from the comments.

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streety
It's difficult to give a scope of the possibilities. An autonomous 'remote
control' car has been mentioned above. Other types of robots. Musical
instruments. Burglar alarms.

Take a look at the exhibition section of the arduino forum:
<http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?board=projects> Also the projects
from the "Designing with Microcontrollers" class at Cornell University:
[http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ee476/FinalProjects...](http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ee476/FinalProjects/)

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drRoflol
Just ordered mine, don't have any specific plans for it just yet, just tought
it might come in handy during summer-boredom. And at that price, incl shipping
(to Norway!), it really was a no-brainer;)

But I do have a question that I couldn't find an answer for on their page, can
it run without being connected to a computer? Can i just mount it with a 5V
battery and send it on my verry own Mars-mission?o0

Given that I just ordered it I havent googled it that much, but do anyone have
any blogs/communities they can recommend for reading/getting help/getting
ideas/brainstorming?

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mathgenius
Answer is yes. I often run it on my phone charger which has a mini-usb plug.
All it needs is 5V.

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maximilian
I totally just bought one for the autonomous "RC"-car (it won't be RC when i'm
done) that I'm gonna build this summer. Its gonna have gps and every sensor I
can think of. Thanks god its summer.

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jrockway
Anyone writing their software for these things in a language other than C? I
have tried cross-compiling various Schemes to run on these, but am not having
much luck. (Scheme implementations seem to do a lot of weird things...)

I have not tried ECL yet, though, which might be easier... and I like CL
better than Scheme.

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epall
Oh man, PJRC is so awesome. My first microcontroller ever was a PJRC 8051
development board.

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aswanson
Is the USB stack developed or do you have to write it for your standalone
config?

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m_eiman
They provide a bunch of ready-made apps that make the thing act as a keyboard,
mouse and some other devices. I haven't looked at it in detail, but I got the
impression that they've taken care of the nitty gritty bits of USB and let you
do the fun stuff.

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stcredzero
Are those 9 PWM outputs or inputs? Probably outputs. I need 8 PWM inputs, with
an accuracy of 1/5th of a degree.

