Jantje:
MichaelMeissner:
retrolefty:
Ok, but lets focus a bit. What would be your recommendation to a newbie to the hobby (with little or no electronics or software experiance) as to which would be their best choice to enter the arduino world once the Due is in fact avalible. I vote Uno, you vote ?
LeftyRight now (October 2012), the Uno. However, I imagine by the January time frame, it would be probably be the Due. There is a saying in parts of the US, that pioneers are the ones with arrows in their back, and anybody that buys a Due on day one is a pioneer. But after the initial problems are sorted out, I see the current 8-bit chips going being more of a niche market. Will it happen overnight? Certainly not, but it will happen.
I fully agree with this. Certainly for newbies the stabilized due will be the platform of choice. It just makes everything easier. For instance it takes away the problem of memory management for small projects. You can do some really bad coding and still have enough cpu left not to notice.
It just makes the start easier and the old farts like me will do the hard work on the small slow 8 bit chips.
At least that means I will have a job until I die
Best regards
Jantje
I still say a begineer to electronics is better off starting with a Uno. One other reason would be the very wimpy output pins that ARM chips have, even driving a 20ma led will require a switching transistor making a learning lesson all that much more complex to build and understand. Most all tutorials showing interfacing to simple circuits will have to be revaluated to see if they are compatible with ARM output/input pin specs. I think the rather rugged I/O pins of the AVR 8 bitters work much to the favor of raw begineers. Keep pushing those Uno boards. I think many are focusing too much on what a ARM chip is better at, rather then also considering what a 328P chip is better at in context to someone first starting out building simple stuff to learn how electronics works.
Lefty