Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Not comparing to Zephyr, which ticks all the same boxes, is absolutely a problem.

And I would argue that Arduino support nowadays is a negative, not a positive. Arduino support means that you are going to do a bunch of things to support 8 and 16 bit systems that look absolutely silly on 32 bit systems. And, it's not even clear that Arduino systems are actually cheaper or lower power than ARM Cortex-M4 systems anymore--which negates the advantage of Arduinos.




I completely switched to the Adafruit Feather M4 series for my hobby electronics about 5 years ago. Each board might be a little more expensive than a base Arduino, but they are way more powerful and have a lot of great features.


If you want to go "budget", STM32 hardware (like the common "blue pill" STM32F103C8 board) is priced comparably to a knockoff Arduino, if not cheaper.


You can now get much more powerfull STM32F411CEU6 boards for the same price.


Which boards are you thinking of? "Blue pill" STM32F103C8 boards are $2 to $3, if you're willing to run the risk of getting a cloned microcontroller. (The clones are actually quite usable for most purposes.)


The clones even tend to have more memory.

But I was thinking of those boards: https://aliexpress.com/item/4000103610226.html

(also supported by RIOT btw https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT/pull/12778)


Oh, those! I have one of the F401 models -- I didn't know there was a F411 variant, though, nor that they've gotten so cheap. There might be a purchase in my future. :)


Some clones even have chip errata fixed.


For a similar reason I switched over the Wemos Mini-D1. In my case having onboard Wifi is usually more important to me than having extra I/O ports.


Those M4's are handy! I use the Adafruit Itsy M4s. Wait does this support them?!


> Arduino support means that you are going to do a bunch of things to support 8 and 16 bit systems that look absolutely silly on 32 bit systems.

[citation required]


Just talking about memory--far pointers, banks that have to be switched in and out, non-uniform memory accesses, etc.

Putting those into a compiler puts an enormous amount of surface into a compiler that is completely useless on 32-bit architectures.


Not sure why you're being downvoted. ISAs like avr, 8051, and msp430 aren't really any crazier than arm. The archs that are a pain aren't because they're 8/16 bit.


...and then you can start to use mbed.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: