Just saw the new Teensy.

Still picking my jaw up. These are $19.95 (no pins installed).

https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy40.html

Technical Specifications
ARM Cortex-M7 at 600 MHz
1024K RAM (512K is tightly coupled)
2048K Flash (64K reserved for recovery & EEPROM emulation)
2 USB ports, both 480 MBit/sec
3 CAN Bus (1 with CAN FD)
2 I2S Digital Audio
1 S/PDIF Digital Audio
1 SDIO (4 bit) native SD
3 SPI, all with 16 word FIFO
3 I2C, all with 4 byte FIFO
7 Serial, all with 4 byte FIFO
32 general purpose DMA channels
31 PWM pins
40 digital pins, all interrrupt capable
14 analog pins, 2 ADCs on chip
Cryptographic Acceleration
Random Number Generator
RTC for date/time
Programmable FlexIO
Pixel Processing Pipeline
Peripheral cross triggering
Power On/Off management

I have not managed to exhaust the capabilities of a Mega yet.

I can't help wondering where is the boundary between a "better" microprocessor board and a minimal PC like an RPi. An RPi has a lot of labour-saving features for the developer.

...R

For one, that board could be programmed to use Strings a lot more than any AVR-duino.

I think the big difference is these start at..

setup() { }

loop() { }

RPi? You have the whole unix box learning curve to deal with. For a beginner, or myself, that's just daunting.

I can pick up one of them teensy 4 things, hook it to a touchscreen and hey presto! I have an easy to program tablet to play with! The possibilities are endless!

-jim lee

How about a model sailboat about a meter long?

GoForSmoke:
How about a model sailboat about a meter long?

Wouldn't a nano be sufficient?

...R

Not sure when close navigation is added to sensing.

Boat doesn't always go where you point, there are factors like boat speed, wind speed and direction, sail angle and state, they multiply table space needed to store cycle-saving precalculations to speed up navigation and I'm not so sure that the Nano has enough flash.

A person with extensive knowledge of sailing and the particular boat the model is of could say more.

A Nano controlled rowboat could work. No sails.

GoForSmoke:
Not sure when close navigation is added to sensing.

Boat doesn't always go where you point, there are factors like boat speed, wind speed and direction, sail angle and state, they multiply table space needed to store cycle-saving precalculations to speed up navigation and I'm not so sure that the Nano has enough flash.

A Mega, then?

The point about managing a sailboat is that nothing needs happen quickly by microprocessor standards.

At the other extreme, trying to capture the capabilities of a successful sailboat racing skipper would be a challenge even on a powerful laptop. It may well be the case that the skipper cannot explain why he is successful.

...R

Skippering a sailboat takes a huge amount of "black art". A lot of it just the "feel" you get from the boat. There is no end to what you can learn about sailing. Its also a good way to cut trough B.S. because no one can fake it.

-jim lee

The new Teensy is ridiculous, especially for the price.

I built a portable NES emulator around one. It has a 3.2" SPI LCD, a port for a real NES controller, and a speaker for the audio. It works great, and is not even maxing out the CPU! It's using somewhere around 70-80% of it's capability.

For those that don't know, emulating the graphics of a NES is very CPU-intensive. Running the same code on a Mega2560 got me about 1 FPS. It might have even been less than that, I can't remember.