Hmmm, I got into arduino as a less painful way (vs using a propeller or basic) to investigate possible solutions for a server "airflow/temperature/hardware-state" monitoring and control platform.
Actually, the hardest part of doing useful things with an MCU isn't the features (or their lack) offerred by the MCU. The hardest part about
doing useful things in embedded systems-land is knowing electronics-design, and implementation 'well'.
For example: Doing PWM, won't matter a wink if one doesn't have their transistor "merit badge" hanging on the wall, and then of course
we (as in me and my fellow web devs turned fearless electronics explorers) wouldn't be bothering with all this MCU stuff if we couldn't monitor
the fan speeds in realtime.
Welcome to pulse count and estimation hell.... So then we discovered frequency to voltage ICs, yay!
Then PWM came back to bite us in the arse.... The tachometer signal from those expensive 12k rpm fans? Um yeah
the PWM as amplified through the n-channel mosfets causes the power delivery to the fan motor to look like little slices of
quantum physical reality... Um, even the tach signal looks like some chopped up quasi synthetic square-wave wanna be...
It's time for the "Signal conditioning" merit badge... RC equations, oh joy...
So what I'm trying to say here is, I could literally care less when the Due comes out, frankly I'll probably order a maple mini and
use it to test 72 Mhz goodness, and when the Due finally lumbers out backed by the full faith and example arsenal of the arduino project,
then yeah, I'll spring for one.
'But I ain't waitin' with bated breath... There's real work to be done... One of my new fascinations/temporary obsessions is the use of Attiny85/45 chips
as "PWM cores", "external sensor management nodes" and other cool program cycle-saving roles in an electronic circuit.
My arduino nano can be made to program them and mouser sells the 85/45 for under a buck a piece.
Goodbye 555, hello superpowers.
So if/when the Due is finally released then 'yay', until then, it's time to earn my "dB-speak" merit badge.
Ah the joys of hardware implementations, the LAMP stack holds no terrors for those who have braved the icy waters of embedded systems work.
Carry on!