

Taking the Training Wheels Off the Arduino - gvb
http://spin.atomicobject.com/2011/10/15/taking-the-training-wheels-off-the-arduino/

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cpswan
I've found the TI MSP-430 fairly good as a cheaper/rawer alternative to
Arduino. It comes with Eclipse based tooling to program the microcontrollers
in C or assembly.

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weaksauce
I was under the assumption that they didn't have many timers... I just looked
again and maybe they added models with more than one timer but now they have
some that are up to 4 timers and still only 1.50USD. That makes things more
useful.

It should also be noted that the msp starter kit is only ~4 bucks and has a
full usb starter board with i/o breakouts. pretty cool stuff.

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reemrevnivek
There are over 300 different models of the MSP430, ranging from the G2 or
Value Line parts having 1k of Flash, a couple hundred bytes of RAM and usually
one timer to the F5 series with 100-pin parts having 256kB of Flash and 16k of
RAM, and 4 timers. Limiting yourself to stuff that's compatible with the $4.30
starter kit is not an accurate representation of the MSP430 lineup.

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theatrus2
I agree. However, if you're not willing to spend money on Code Composer, IAR,
or something similar, the GCC port isn't up to snuff on the 430X variants. In
fact, the whole split personality of 16/20bit mode makes me want to just give
up and use an ARM (Energy Micro EFM32, for instance).

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sliverstorm
The code limitations on CCS aren't too bad. Though, yes, ARM chips are
awesome. STMicro has some really nice ones, with beautiful documentation and
libraries.

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jdietrich
I do wonder what the future is for the Arduino with the upcoming launch of the
Raspberry Pi[1]. What aspiring hardware hacker would spend $30 on an Atmel
development board when there's an ARM-based board available for $25 that'll do
so much more?

I think we're in for a fascinating few years, as powerful but dirt-cheap
featurephone chipsets start trickling out into the hardware hacking community.

[1] www.raspberrypi.org

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nrp
There are already several significantly more powerful ARM Cortex-M3 boards
available for around the price of an Arduino[0][1]. The draw of the Arduino is
ease of use in interfacing to GPIO/UART/i2c and in the community of
accessories, documentation, and code that exists around it.

[0]
[http://shop.ngxtechnologies.com/product_info.php?cPath=21...](http://shop.ngxtechnologies.com/product_info.php?cPath=21&products_id=65)
[1] <http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8559>

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frou_dh
Very nice! I've looked for such a guide in the past but could only find
outdated or messier approaches.

