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by ballooney 4463 days ago
The arduino is really just a breakout board for a microcontroller made by Atmel, with a simplified development environment to lower the barrier to entry. The microcontroller chip itself has always been a couple of dollars, and was before the arduino was invented.

Really you could say that paying $20/board to break out a $2 chip was the insane bit (of course, if it makes the difference between you tinkering and not tinkering, totally worth it). It certainly hasn't been the cost of making arduinos that's been holding back your 'amazingly disruptive disposable electronics' - no chinese factory will have been paying more than a few cents in total parts costs for their mass-produced widgets of this sort for years now.

If you want garage-tinkering-friendly microcontrollers, can I tempt you with the newish NXP LPC810 [1]? It has a 32-bit core which can run at 30MHz (as compared to the 8-bit core running at about 16MHz on the arduino, iirc), and they're $1.37 in single units, less than 60 cents if you want 1000. ARM maintain a whole GNU toolchain [2] to develop on them - it couldn't be easier.

[1] http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/LPC810M021FN8FP/568...

[2] https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded
2 comments
tdicola 4462 days ago
An Arduino is a little more complicated than a breakout for the ATmega. There's a power regulator so you can use any 6-12V supply, a USB to serial converter chip (FT232R), and various passive components to support the chip.

The LPC810 is neat, but very limited in flash memory and I/O. Check out the NXP LPC1114FN28--it's a 28 pin breadboard friendly DIP package ARM cortex M0: http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers/cortex_m0_m0/lp... 32k of flash and a similar amount of I/O as the ATmega328P used in an Arduino. The big advantage of ARM is that you can use free in circuit debugging tools like OpenOCD to debug and step through code in real time on the chip. It's not easy to do that on an Arduino without a $50+ adapter.

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fnordfnordfnord 4462 days ago
It's not just the breakout. Microcontrollers like the AVR existed 20 years ago. You could get them and put them on a breadboard with a few components, and they would work, but you still had a lot more work to do before you could do anything with them. You'd have to build or buy a programmer, that was a task in and of itself (for a neophyte). IMO the thing that really sets Arduino apart from engineer/technically-proficient-hacker domain is the bootloader.

I like & use the LPC Expresso stuff too, but you can do a lot with an Arduino.

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