Anyone want to talk about Arduino? I've been playing with it a bit
recently, and I'm wondering just how much time I should invest in it...
Arduino seems to be a microcontroller environment aimed at
non-engineers, sorta like Parallax's Basic Stamp. There have been
websites calling it a Stamp Replacement, in fact. The hardware is an
ATmega8 or mega168 with USB or Serial interface, ISP connector, and a
standardized layout of 13 "digital IO" pins and 6 "analog input" pins.
The software consists of an IDE that works on top of (and vastly
simplifies) gcc, some startup and library code (an environment
apparently called "wiring"), and a bootloader. It runs on Macs,
Windows, and linux.
It's cute. All the HW and SW is open source. I think the concept of
wrapping some user-friendly IDE and pre-processing around gcc is pretty
close to brilliant, but then I don't really need it. There are other
advantages and disadvantages:
+ Simplified SW IDE
- not small; runtime+bootloader is approx 4k
+ moderately capable HW.
+ Standardized connector layout enables "shields."
- connector layout is 'odd'; not "on-grid"
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