Hello,
I think we all know that the uC on the Mega 2560 is very crappy uC for today's standards.
I am looking for a better and faster uC board much like the Arduino Mega 2560 that can be programmed with the Arduino IDE, and has the same voltage levels (5V operating voltage, and 12V input)
Thanks
I disagree with your statement.
It may too slow and have too little SRAM for your specific (unstated) application.
For many others, it provides all the processing power needed.
The IDE is written for a few core processors, and others are added by 3rd party folks.
Take a look here, see if any will suit your needs:
www.avr-developers.com
Let us know how you make out in your search.
I am looking for a better and faster uC board
Can you define "better" and more explicitely how fast it should be?
Or maybe tell about the application you want to make?
Ok fair enough...
For what I need imagine this:
I have close to 10 sensors, of which 8 are analogs. The "board" should be able to read all of these sensors, do some calculation, and send the calculated values of these sensors to computer using very fast serial communication. The "board" should be able to do these tasks every ms or less... This is the kind of processing I am doing.
I have tested this kind of thing with Arduino, and it crashes all the time. Simply put, Arduino does not come close to the processing power I need.
FardinB:
I think we all know that the uC on the Mega 2560 is very crappy uC for today's standards.
Says who? I still haven't ever needed a Mega 2560 and I've built lots of complex stuff. If I need more power I use multimple Mega328s, or maybe a Mega328 plus a tiny.
eg. The thing I'm building right now uses an Arduino Pro Mini for main CPU (Mega328) and a Tiny85 chip to control a WS2811 LED strip. I added the Tiny85 because the Mega328 needs to have interrupts enabled and a long WS2811 LED strip prevents this.
If the Mega 2560 is limiting you and you're not doing serious number crunching then either a) you're writing some very inefficient code, or b) you're not getting creative enough with the hardware.
FardinB:
I am looking for a better and faster uC board
You'll have to be a lot more specific than that if you want any help. The 5V requirement severely limits your choices.
FardinB:
Ok fair enough...For what I need imagine this:
I have close to 10 sensors, of which 8 are analogs. The "board" should be able to read all of these sensors, do some calculation, and send the calculated values of these sensors to computer using very fast serial communication. The "board" should be able to do these tasks every ms or less... This is the kind of processing I am doing.
Reading 10 sensors is easy, a Leonardo has USB for fast data transfer... what sort of "calculation"?
FardinB:
I have tested this kind of thing with Arduino, and it crashes all the time. Simply put, Arduino does not come close to the processing power I need.
'Crashing' has nothing to do with processing power. It's bad code.
Odd.
Analog read requires 110uS, x 8 = 880uS.
Digital read of a sensor takes very little time, maybe as low as 1uS for a 1 byte SPI read.
Reading a switch/button state even less.
If you are sending data to PC at 115,200, that is also very fast.
Arduino has the processing power needed, just maybe not the speed you need due to the calculations you are doing.
If you replace the Analog read with an external SPI interfaced ADC, you can get a lot of time back.
http://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/Devices.aspx?dDocName=en010534
A 3-byte SPI transfer is needed to command a conversion and read the result. Which takes 3-4uS? x 8 = 40-50uS.
So now you have most of 1000uS available for other stuff.
and has the same voltage levels (5V operating voltage, and 12V input)
There are tons of such mcus, however 5V operating voltage could be an issue. All newer chips (ARM, MIPS, etc. based) are 3V3 mostly. Some pins are 5V tolerant, however.
For faster operation you may consider DUE (arm based) or Chipkit (pic32mx based).