

Arduino launches new products in maker faire - Garbage
http://arduino.cc/blog/2011/09/17/arduino-launches-new-products-in-maker-faire/

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rryan
Interesting to see Arduino getting into ARM. The LeafLabs Maple always
appealed to me way more than Arduino because of the beefy STM32 ARM processor
it comes with. (Well, also because their libraries, team, and documentation
are all top-notch). It will be interesting to see how much ARM catches on
among hobbyists now that it has the weight of the Arduino brand behind it.

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Gussy
It's a huge shame that none of the existing ARM Cortex M3 Arduino-like
platforms (Maple, Corduino etc.) ever took off. While this is mostly likely
because of the projects not being officially endorsed by Arduino, it does also
make you wonder if there is actually a demand for this higher level of
capability. I have a bad feeling that offering a much more powerful Arduino
will only result in people writing more inefficient code.

Moving into ARM territory was always inevitable for Arduino, it has just taken
a little longer than it should have, because Atmel were a little behind the
curve in getting their Cortex M3 offerings onto the table. What does surprise
me is that it has taken this long for Atmel to step in and offer some support
to Arduino.

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sliverstorm
_I have a bad feeling that offering a much more powerful Arduino will only
result in people writing more inefficient code._

I'm sure the ARM-duino JVM & the Ruby interptreter is right around the corner
:/

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jimmyjim
Small curiosity: Is Arduino used purely by hobbyists, or is it being used in
the industry anywhere?

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Gussy
It depends what you mean by industry.

No reasonably qualified electronic engineer would use the Arduino platform in
a commercial design. Most managers would laugh at any EE who suggested such a
thing. I am not aware of any mass produced (consumer, not hobbyist) product or
device which uses the Arduino platform. In the industry of fashion and art
(which I know very little about) many makers/creators/designers are
incorporating Arduinos into art installations and fashion items, although from
what I understand these are mostly one-off items.

~~~
sophacles
Why not use the Arduino for rapid prototyping then the once you figure the
design out, lay out a board based on the Atmega chip? (or some of the lighter-
weight chips that would run the same code...)?

It sounds like 8 years ago when "most managers" and "reasonably qualified"
programmers would get laughed at for suggesting ruby or python for a serious
production project.

~~~
Gussy
The reason it doesn't get used for serious or complex projects is simply
because of it's lack of capabilities. The big one is debugging and this is a
huge reason for why you won't see EEs using these at their day jobs.
Electronic engineers are accustomed to being able to step through code, watch
variables and all the other niceties that in-circuit debugging offers. With
Arduino you lose all of this, your flying blind with maybe a flashing LED or a
serial output to help you out. Who knows how you will detect elusive bugs like
out-of-bound array errors. The time you gain with some nice wrapper functions
and libraries you will quickly lose when trying to debug a complex project.
Features wise, you can do things most of the more advanced features which
require bit manipulation of the AVRs registers like interrupts, timers, etc.
with Arduino. Though at that point the lines are so blurred because half your
code is AVR-GCC and half is Arduino. Why don't we see the simple consumer
products using Arduinos? I don't know for sure but it's most likely because
something simple is just as quick to code without the Arduino libraries.

Atmel and most other micro suppliers are now coming out with their own
"frameworks" these days, which are similar to Arduino in providing libraries
for common tasks with a similar level of abstraction to Arduino, without the
loss of the higher level functionality like debugging. These are a lot more
attractive to EEs than Arduino is.

It will be interesting to see how this changes over the next 5 or so years. By
then most of the young engineers who grew up with Arduino or were even
introduced to electronics with Arduino will have graduated University and will
be working in the industry. It will be interesting to see the effects that
this generation of new engineers have.

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trafficlight
What are the interesting frameworks these days?

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nemik
The closest ones I know of are FreeScale's PE (Processor Expert) which has
been around a while and is quite decent; I've used it with the HCS08's.

TI started one for its MSP430's called Grace this summer, but it's very very
primitive thus far.

Atmel also has one called FLIP for its USB-enabled MCU's to make them act as
various USB profiles/devices.

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lutorm
This reminded me that I've been thinking of playing with a Real-time OS. My
impression is that it's possible to run something on an Arduino. Does anyone
have any experience with this?

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sp332
It's an 8-bit RISC chip, so it might be a little small. It's more of a micro-
controller than a CPU, if you know what I mean.

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joshu
really? i was under the impression it was a really fast 8051 clone.

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unwind
The AVR is RISC, it's not a 8051 clone at all. See
<[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmel_AVR>](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmel_AVR>).

