
Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1 - stefanpie
https://jaycarlson.net/microcontrollers/
======
alister
If I hadn't seen this article on Hacker News today, is there any combination
of plausible keywords I could have typed into Google to find this particular
article if I were looking for an in-depth review of microcontrollers?

I tried "best microcontrollers reviewed", "best low-cost microcontrollers",
"survey of microcontrollers", and a bunch of others. Nothing that Google finds
in the first 10-20 hits is as good this resource, other than Wikipedia, though
very good, isn't a technical review.

I suppose the lessons are: there's room for lots of improvement in search
engines, or SEO really works and you better promote yourself no matter how
good you are, or word of mouth (Hacker News in this case) is still the way to
find the best stuff.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
This article is remarkable because there is typically very limited accessible
blogs about topics like this. This long article requires in-depth knowledge of
a large number of microcontrollers, and the time, desire, and ability to
verify, collate, and summarize all that information. That's a rare
combination.

An ordinary journalist could not write this article. It would take hundreds or
thousands of hours to gain the domain knowledge required to understand what
needs to be written up and described - it demonstrates a deep understanding of
topics like ISR latencies, peripheral compatibility, memory and instruction
requirements, and other stuff that really matters to engineers but is
typically beyond the reach of a casual reader. As a result, news in the field
is very, very rarely unbiased, informative reviews - there are a lot of 'new
product' press releases unsubtly promoted as 'articles'.

An embedded systems engineer at some company building a product using these
microcontrollers would not write up this article. Not only is the
comprehensive knowledge required uncommon even among skilled engineers, it
would take dozens of non-billable hours and would make it easier for
competitors. And we typically have very narrow domain expertise, so the
ability to create a website and rich blog experience like this would be
unusual. (The database issues the site had under load this morning are
excused!) Open-source and information sharing are not commonplace within
embedded systems development.

And you won't be able to easily generate this comparison yourself without a
lot of work. You might think that the numbers described would be front-and-
center on the first page of each datasheet for these microcontrollers. But
you'd be wrong, or at least naive. Each manufacturer's marketing department
exaggerates their numbers in slightly different ways, so the first page of the
datasheet is inevitably worthless bull shit.

~~~
koancone
So why was it written, what is the motivation of the author?

~~~
vidarh
From the first sentences of this article:

> As an embedded design consultant

I know that for my own part, a lot of what I blog when I blog tends to be
motivated _either_ from increasing my professional visibility _or_ because
it's something I spend time doing anyway and where I figure I it'll be useful
to someone (I know I've done it right whenever I find my own blog posts in
search results a couple of years later and they answer my question)

~~~
LeifCarrotson
And it works, depending on who you are trying to reach.

I know that this article has me completely convinced that Jay could be
extremely effective assisting with any of my projects. Much more so than any
Ivy League diplomas, years of experience or lack thereof, glossy brochures,
testimonials, or other conventional marketing tools. And it's significantly
more effective than any FizzBuzz quiz I could administer to potential
candidates.

For all the foibles of business politics, expert opinion from within the
organization is extremely persuasive when it's available (though an
organization that really needs Jay's services because they have no internal
experts would have a hard time using this article).

------
abetusk
The most relevant part for me is this cherry picked line from the article:

    
    
        ...
        Consequently, the megaAVR remains the most open-source
        8-bit microcontroller on the market — by a long shot.
        ...
    

Even though the Atmel AVRs aren't the fastest, or cheapest (in cost per unit)
or the toolchain isn't the easiest to use or the debugging capabilities aren't
as good, the fact that it's open-source makes it win, hands down. There's a
reason why nearly every hobby electronics project you see has an Arduino in
it. Assuming the Arduino IDE is installed and permissions issues have been
resolved, you can go from unboxing your Arduino to making it blink in under 60
seconds.

In addition, places like Adafruit [1] and Sparkfun [2] build their own boards
and make most of their code free/libre/open-source [3] [4], with a large focus
on Arduino.

It'll be interesting to see how the electronics market evolves when the
current and subsequent generations are trained on AVRs.

[1] [https://www.adafruit.com/](https://www.adafruit.com/)

[2] [https://www.sparkfun.com/](https://www.sparkfun.com/)

[3] [https://github.com/adafruit](https://github.com/adafruit)

[4] [https://github.com/sparkfun](https://github.com/sparkfun)

~~~
gh02t
It's important to note the rest of that portion though.

    
    
        But even as popular as Atmel is among hobbyists, Atmel has largely stayed out of this 
        space directly. Instead, they’ve secured small-volume AVR sales by relying on the open-
        source community to build their own tools for themselves: turning out a slew of 
        hardware and software used to program the megaAVR devices.
    
        While I applaud the efforts of these developers, these tools are inferior to Atmel’s. 
        Their programming speeds are terrible, they don’t support the new tinyAVR 1-Series 
        devices, and they have absolutely no debug capability.
    

Atmel has deliberately enabled the open source toolchains for its MCUs but it
largely keeps out of it directly.

~~~
Stratoscope
Mobile-friendly copy of the parent's quote:

> _Consequently, the megaAVR remains the most open-source 8-bit
> microcontroller on the market — by a long shot._

and your quote:

> _But even as popular as Atmel is among hobbyists, Atmel has largely stayed
> out of this space directly. Instead, they’ve secured small-volume AVR sales
> by relying on the open-source community to build their own tools for
> themselves: turning out a slew of hardware and software used to program the
> megaAVR devices._

> _While I applaud the efforts of these developers, these tools are inferior
> to Atmel’s. Their programming speeds are terrible, they don’t support the
> new tinyAVR 1-Series devices, and they have absolutely no debug capability._

Don't use leading spaces to quote text, that's for unformatted text. Do this
instead:

    
    
      > *Text.*

------
pjc50
This is a fantastic article, a thesis-length piece of work covering the
subject from every possible angle. And it's all on a single page, not an ad-
encumbered pagethrough like some review sites.

Ecosystem is an interesting area. It seems that everyone has converged on
Eclipse, which is probably better than trying to write their own environment
but can still be infuriatingly clunky at times.

I'm impressed with the breadth of this review and the commitment to including
everything that fits in the $1 parameter - which is now quite a lot, I hadn't
expected to see Cypress PSOC there.

------
VLM
No love for the PIC10 series? Perhaps too many PIC already in the review would
make it look like a MicroCHIP(TM) press release. I do see some justification
in that the 10F series is more of the twenty five cents class not the $1
class. Those things are strangely charming, I had a lot of fun with the now-
discontinued 10F2xx series. Adjusted for inflation the 10F3xx are now cheaper
than the 10F2xx were, which is cool. Its strange to drink a can of diet coke
knowing it costs 3 times as much as the controller you're troubleshooting.

Another novelty of small/cheap controllers is when I was playing with the
defunct 10F2xx family I didn't own a meter sensitive enough to measure the
current draw at 32 khz clock. I do now, but it was an expensive meter! In the
old days cheap EE would wire up a capacitor and run the ckt off the cap and
time how long the voltage drop took and use that to create an imaginary
resistance and use the measured V and theoretical R to calculate the
theoretical current. Of course my cheap meter drew more current than the
microcontroller which leads to weird games like sample voltage for a second.
Also leakage currents in most caps is larger than the uC current draw oh so
much fun fun fun. One trick is to drive a square wave generator thru a diode
to a low leakage ceramic disk cap, assuming your reset circuitry is faster
than the square wave and you trust the DC response of your scope. Another
thing I tried was creating a transfer function where a 100 watt lightbulb and
a tiny solar panel generate say, 1 mA, so a 99.9% optical attenuator in front
of the cell means 1 uA, right? Of course sleep current is a tiny fraction of
that, so you stack a SECOND optical attenuator on the solar cell, say merely
99% blocking, and that should be 10 nA which is about half sleep current,
right? You can also play games when your CPU costs 30 cents like hooking up
100 in parallel for $30 to measure 100x average current. Low current is fun if
you're ever bored.

~~~
pjc50
Whenever this kind of low current stuff is discussed, I like to bring up the
master, Bob Pease: [http://www.electronicdesign.com/test-amp-
measurement/whats-a...](http://www.electronicdesign.com/test-amp-
measurement/whats-all-femtoampere-stuff-anyhow)

(also the article has reservations about PIC, pointing out its strangenesses
and describing PIC24 as underwhelming)

------
Yaggo
Didn't read all the author's criteria, but esp8266 is worth mentioning in the
context of cheap microcontrollers.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266)

~~~
lucaspiller
Yeah if anyone is just looking to get started tinkering with embedded hardware
I'd say this is the way to go. The chips were made popular by NodeMCU which
uses Lua, but you can easily run Arduino or write plain C on the same
hardware.

I've tried a few breakout boards and my favourite is the WEMOS D1 Mini. All
you need to supply is a MicroUSB cable. You can get them shipped from China
for under $3:
[https://wiki.wemos.cc/products:d1:d1_mini](https://wiki.wemos.cc/products:d1:d1_mini)

~~~
jo909
Absolute favorite for me too. ESP32 is now also widely available and pretty
cheap for it's performance.

My second favorite ESP8266 hardware are the "Sonoff" brand WLAN mains power
switches. I especially like the Sonoff S20 for its form factor, and the Sonoff
POW for it's power metering capability. They contain an ESP8266 and can be
reflashed with different firmware that does not need the vendors cloud
services to work.

~~~
StavrosK
Oooh, ITEAD make sockets now? I got a bunch of switches a while ago, wrote my
own firmware for them, and today I saw their wifi-enabled light switch and got
one of those too. I love love _love_ their stuff, they make it super easy to
retrofit my house with "smart" devices where _I_ can control every line of
code.

------
cjsuk
That’s a rather good article. I will digest that today.

I’m currently using Cypress’s PSoC line (4200M boards) for a couple of
personal projects. The reconfigurable hardware and analogue parts actually
kill a lot of external hardware. It’s pretty amazing and ridiculously cheap.
Visual Studio is the IDE for this.

[https://uk.rs-online.com/mobile/p/processor-
microcontroller-...](https://uk.rs-online.com/mobile/p/processor-
microcontroller-development-kits/1244185/)

Note: don’t just jump into these if you think it’s just a better Arduino as
the learning curve is extreme. You really have to know your stuff before you
open the box.

~~~
joezydeco
PSoC is an underrated line of parts. Now that they've dropped the wacky
8051-alike used in the older models and switched to ARM, there's a lot more
you can do with these things.

~~~
jason_s
hope the development toolchain is better than it was 6 or 7 years ago... I
wanted to look into PSoC but couldn't figure out how to blink an LED after a
few hours of messing around with it, so I gave up. And I'm not a beginner;
I've had 22 years of microcontroller experience.

~~~
joezydeco
It's still heavily dependent on the IDE, but at least you're not bound to the
compilers that were used 6 or 7 years ago. The better compiler of the two was
bought by Microchip and subsequently abandoned/crippled-on-purpose for the
PSoC instruction set.

------
m_eiman
Perhaps Jay should have hosted the page on a microcontroller instead of a
database; archive copy:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20171106070102/https://jaycarlso...](https://web.archive.org/web/20171106070102/https://jaycarlson.net/microcontrollers/)

~~~
jaydcarlson
With 21 of these parts on my desk, that would have been a good idea. Thanks
for linking to a cached version — I'm working to get my little blog on
Cloudflare to handle the traffic.

I appreciate the kind words from everyone so far; it's been a huge learning
opportunity, and I hope others can get inspired to grab one of these parts
(especially one of the weirder ones) and do something cool with it.

~~~
hathawsh
I would pay for a book version of this work, or at least a PDF that I could
print. It would be the kind of book that I could really get into. Fantastic
work.

~~~
throwawaybbqed
I'd like to second that. I skimmed through this yesterday and about to board a
long flight. Frantically caching :-p

------
dvfjsdhgfv
> And even if it were properly executed, I think I reject the underlying goal
> of this strategy. The whole purpose of using an Arduino UNO form-factor is
> to support Arduino shields — yet I have never seen an Arduino shield on the
> desk of a professional engineer or advanced hobbyist. At least, not one
> plugged into one of these “Uno form-factor” dev boards.

I have to chime in. What's the point of using the UNO form factor if you don't
support the shields, libraries or the environment? It makes completely no
sense.

~~~
Hasz
The code. The shields are pretty worthless, but the availability of libraries
and example code is excellent.

Instead of working out all the fine details of I2C, I can call a well
developed function that takes care of all that for me. Instead of spending
days writing a graphics library, I can find an off the shelf GFX library that
has more features/is faster/ etc

The ability to move quickly with well documented, prebuilt libraries is
invaluable when you want to get something up and running ASAP.

Once you're ready to develop it, then you can go back, strip out everything
that's not needed, rewrite things, etc.

That's the beauty of Arduino.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
The problem is that there are a lot of Arduino form-factor mainboards from
other manufacturers (like the one in the article) which have no code provided.
But manufacturers cargo-cult into the form factor without realizing that code
is the important thing.

------
neya
I've had the best overall experience using an ATTINY85 [1]. It almost serves
my purpose for every use case I've had in the past couple of years - Running
steppers, basic home automation, wireless, etc.

If you buy them in bulk, you can get it down to less than $1 per MC. [2]

You can even install Arduino libs on it and the Arduino interface has quite
good support for it as well.

Some of my projects with it include a DSLR camera slider [3], wireless home
automation (turn off lights when I'm not in the room, communicate with my air-
conditioner to maintain the room temperature using IR, etc.)

[1]
[http://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATtiny85](http://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATtiny85)

[2] [https://www.ebay.com/itm/5PCS-ATTINY85-20PU-IC-
MCU-8BIT-8KB-...](https://www.ebay.com/itm/5PCS-ATTINY85-20PU-IC-MCU-8BIT-8KB-
FLASH-8DIP-Top-ATTINY85-/192263968340)

[3] [https://www.instagram.com/p/1AscllHDQ0/?taken-
by=discovery.d...](https://www.instagram.com/p/1AscllHDQ0/?taken-
by=discovery.diary)

~~~
kirillkh
Do you just use development boards with these? And which ones?

~~~
DSMan195276
You don't really need a dev board for these, you can just stick them in a
breadboard and go, they're already in a DIP package and don't really need any
extra circuitry besides what you're going to connect them to. You can also
program them using basically any other micro-controller you may have, or use a
cheap USB programmer to do it, so they're pretty cheap to get started with
(Though it's not exactly as user-friendly as plugging an Arduino into USB).

------
halamadrid
The waybackmachine link didn't work for me, but this did:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://jaycarlson.net/microcontrollers/)

~~~
VMG
"Remember websites" yeah they always had scaling problems unfortunately :(

------
jaydcarlson
I've made some network changes, and the site should be back up for most users
— let me know if anyone is running into issues!

------
hahamrfunnyguy
If I am sourcing a part, I usually start with an objective comparison search
on a distributors web site
([https://www.mouser.com/search/Refine.aspx?N=17176544&Ns=Pric...](https://www.mouser.com/search/Refine.aspx?N=17176544&Ns=Pricing%7c0)).

There's even lots of sub-dollar MCUs out there too. As the author notes,
picking the best one depends a lot on what you need to do.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
There's a lot that's not covered in a parametric search listing. In your link,
picking a core doesn't tell you how good the peripherals are. (Digikey's
parametric search [1] does give you a lot more information about what
peripherals are available where Mouser doesn't even mention it). Clock
frequency doesn't tell you how many cycles the instructions take. And none of
that tells me anything about power consumption or performance in a typical
application, or especially about the usability of the toolchains.

If answering "it depends on what you need to do" requires a lot of domain
expertise to evaluate, there's definitely a place for summaries like this!

[1]: [https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-
ics/...](https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/embedded-
microcontrollers/685)

------
sgt
["amazing", "\$1", "microcontroller"]. HN, you really know how to make me
click a link within no more than 20 ms from seeing the front page.

------
jokoon
Well at this point all I would like to get is a USB-powered linux in a card,
with wifi, optionally with a screen capable enough to display 3 or 4 lines of
text.

I mean raspberry is cool, cheap and everything, but I'd prefer something all
integrated, as small as the raspberry pi zero, less fragile (meaning I can put
in my pocket or bag, and still expect it to work), not necessarily with pins.

I don't know about what the demand is for micro-controllers, but as a consumer
and a developer, having a wifi-capable portable micro computer would really be
cool.

Does it already exist? Under $50?

~~~
davandg
I think that Linus is too heavy for a very cheap "CPU". If by Linux you mean
"something easy to develop on", then most micro-controllers come nowadays with
an Arduino compatible layer.

If you remove the Linux part from your wishlist, you can consider some
"NodeMCU" boards on Chinese websites, eg: [https://www.banggood.com/Wemos-
NODEMCU-ESP8266-12F-WiFi-1_30...](https://www.banggood.com/Wemos-NODEMCU-
ESP8266-12F-WiFi-1_30_96-Inch-OLED-BoardBottom-Plate-p-1176035.html)
[https://www.banggood.com/Wemos-TTGO-WiFi-Bluetooth-
Battery-E...](https://www.banggood.com/Wemos-TTGO-WiFi-Bluetooth-Battery-
ESP32-0_96-Inch-OLED-Development-Tool-p-1213497.html)

~~~
dfox
Arduino-compatible layer is useful when you don't want to setup real IDE or
your own build system for native toolchain. For ease of development it does
not buy you that much over straight C for anything remotely non-trivial. On
the other hand many small MCUs can run RTOSes with somewhat POSIX-ish APIs
(particularly notable in this space is ESPxx, for which the official toolchain
is port of FreeRTOS and probably nobody uses it as bare hardware)

------
jventura
Maybe is not the best topic to ask, but does anyone know good sources
(websites, books, kits) for playing with and learning a bit more about
microcontrollers and electronics? I would prefer structured sources (those
that take newbies by hand) than unstructured ones..

I used to play a little bit with the nerdkits
([http://www.nerdkits.com](http://www.nerdkits.com)) and really enjoyed their
approach but they seem to have gone out of business and their content has not
been updated for some years..

~~~
deeg
adafruit.com and sparkfun.com are two of my go-tos. Pretty strong community
support.

~~~
jventura
Thanks for your input, I briefly checked those links and they seem to be
stores and quite overwhelming in their range of products and tutorials. What
I'm looking for is mostly project tutorials or books at a basic level, as in
"how do I start?". For instance, the nerdkit had me build a temperature sensor
from the most basic parts and display the temperature in a LCD (bundled with
the kit).

Any other suggestions?

Edit: typos

~~~
deeg
Sorry, I should have been more specific. For AdaFruit, there are two (among
many) options. A general "Learn" page (learn.adafruit.com) with all sorts of
step-by-step projects using different microcontrollers. Most products pages
will also have a list of projects and introductory pages (many with video).
For example, the Raspberry Pi has this: www.adafruit.com/product/3055

Sparkfun has pretty much the same thing with a "learn" page
(learn.sparkfun.com) and all sorts of tutorials. E.g. here's a list of
tutorials/projects dealing with ATtiny variants, a microcontroller discussed
in the original artical:
[https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/tags/attiny](https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/tags/attiny)

------
j_s
What is the minimum horsepower to build a WiFi KVM? The monitor part seems
toughest; if it's possible to do so cheaply I don't care how fast it updates.

I plan on trying out this $12 ESP8266-based device which ships configured as a
USB serial port -- I plan on using it as a serial console. It would be awesome
if I could convince it to somehow act as a USB VGA-enough and see both the
boot/BIOS screens and the OS GUI.

[https://github.com/whid-injector/WHID](https://github.com/whid-injector/WHID)

~~~
jo909
USB mouse and keyboard is already possible on ESP8266:
[https://github.com/cnlohr/espusb](https://github.com/cnlohr/espusb)

As for VGA i think you are out of luck, or need a faster/specialized co-
processor. VGA requires 3 analog inputs of at least ~30MHz, and an ESP8266 has
one analog input in the low (I think I've seen 20) kHz range, so more than
1000 times too slow.

~~~
j_s
Thanks much for taking the time to share your expertise in answering my
question!

~~~
jo909
You're welcome. I looked into it because it would make a pretty cool project
and while pretty advanced, not impossible.

The cheapest analog-digital-converter chip I found is the TVP7002. Dealing
with the digital pixel output is still way way too much data, but now it might
be possible to scan the picture a few pixels each loop. The reasonable
approach would be to process it in an FPGA or specialized chip and only deal
with a compressed and scaled image in the ESP8266.

------
kirillkh
Can any of these be programmed with Rust?

~~~
techdragon
Seriously curious about this. If not these ones, what other microcontrollers
have decent or better rust support? Is there a list somewhere? I'm keen to
have more practical uses for my rust skills so I can enjoy using rust without
having to find excuses to use it where I would be more productive with other
languages.

~~~
steveklabnik
Your sibling has some good links, but a decent way to think about it is, from
hard to easy:

* does it have an LLVM backend?

* is it listed on the forge page?

* is it listed as having std support?

The farther you go down this list, the simpler it gets to use Rust for it.

Latest work has been on ARM boards and a ton of work on AVR, which brings 8/16
but support.

------
jhallenworld
Not the cheapest perhaps, but I recently used Ambiq's Apollo for a project.
It's an ultra low power ARM MCU. I found it very nice to use mainly because
Ambiq only has two models at this point, which makes their libraries very
clean.

The other advantage is that its I2C slave core operates autonomously- it
provides a shared register space. It means that a master can write a bunch of
stuff to the shared memory without waking up the CPU during each transaction
(which usually involves clock stretching).

------
dragontamer
I'm not as much of an expert as the writer of this page, but this looks legit.
The major $1 microcontrollers that I've worked with (Atmel series) as well as
the ones that have a LOT of buzz recently (The ST STM32F0 and TI's MSP420) are
all discussed and compared.

~~~
amitprayal
You mean TI's MSP430

------
bhu1st
Not in the list but I used Atmel AT89S51/52, built basic line tracking robot,
pc controlled bot, relay driver, home automation etc

[http://www.atmel.com/images/doc1919.pdf](http://www.atmel.com/images/doc1919.pdf)

------
nojvek
That website took forever to load at 100kbps. So long I cancelled and started
with comments.

I know this is off topic but would love HN to show a page size besides each
link so we know whether the link is even worth opening.

------
syntaxing
Completely off topic but does anyone know what the site is running and whether
its a "theme"? I'm planning to write something technical and I am a huge fan
on how the website is structured.

~~~
pjc50
A quick look at the source suggests it's Wordpress with "TheGem" theme.

~~~
syntaxing
Awesome! Thank you!

------
xt00
Now if somebody from China can make a list of the cheap micros under 1-2 RMB,
now that would be a nice list for super low cost stuff.. that I'd be very
interested in...

~~~
jjcc
There's a popular CPU in China meet your requirement:
[http://stcmcu.com/](http://stcmcu.com/) but in Chinese

~~~
jpablo
Any website where I can order a few for testing?

------
visarga
It's not just microcontrollers that are amazing: using a cheap phone can give
you a screen, a battery, 3G and sensors.

------
kristinmick21
It's not just micro-controllers that are amazing: using a cheap phone can give
you a screen, a battery, 3G & sensors. reply

------
aj7
My compliments for fixing your link loading problem in short order.

------
ammu1966
Yep, I loved this one.

------
0xbear
What's really amazing is that for less than $5 nowadays you can have a 1GHz+
quad core ARM Cortex-a53 with FPU and NEON support. I mean, sure, your entire
device will be more than $5, and it'll be kinda power hungry at 3W or so
running full tilt, but that's a pretty beefy chip for the price of a venti
Starbucks latte, capable of running full Linux, with GPU, media encode/decode,
etc, etc.

~~~
hwh
It is all a question of use case. This reply comes up all the time when I talk
about how I use microcontrollers and what I use them for. For myself,
microcontrollers offer me maximum control with minimum overhead. No OS, or
maybe just some RTOS that does not really "boot" except for copying initial
values for variables from Flash into RAM, being done in a fraction of a
second. Switch it on, off it goes. Interfacing with SRAM and Flash without a
driver.

You can do MCU based PCB designs. It gets harder when it comes to the
mentioned Cortex-A. It will be harder to sample, say, 40 pieces of them.
You're very much supposed (and better off) to buy boards like OrangePi or
similar.

ESP designs, especially ESP32, are somewhat in between. Started off as a
little documented blackbox with a RTOS interface it is now a much better (but
absolutely not on par with Cortex-M designs) documented platform. However,
part of it is still a proprietary code blob. They are beefy beasts, however,
and when you need just that - well, it's a no-brainer. I just wish they were
documented like STM32s plus ARM manuals and had a little more toolchain
support. The price tag keeps me from complaining any louder.

When you don't really have hard constraints and are fine with a 5 second
bootup, chose whatever fits your bill. When exact timing is an issue (and you
don't want to go bare metal on the Cortex-A), when fast bootup is an issue,
well - better look at MCUs.

~~~
0xbear
Not gonna argue with that. I do use MCUs myself where appropriate. I like that
they’re more hardware than software: flash the thing once and it will work
every time from there on out. Very few moving parts, everything is very
simple, power consumption is measured in milliwatts.

But it still blows my mind that the equivalent (a vast superset, if you
consider the GPU and specialized coprocessors) of my workstation from the late
90s now costs less than $5.

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purplezooey
site is down

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Steeeve
Was it running the website?

