Is arduino the right choice?

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) General Frequently-Asked Questions
1

I have programming experience, but no ucontroller or electronics experience. I have a couple ideas for comercial products, and am looking for a development platform that will:

a) be a good platform for learning - i.e. friendly introduction, strong community, lots of code libraries, etc.
b) present me with a clear road to create a product that could be cheaply manufactured.

I believe my ideas are implementable with Atmel AVR tiny's or similar with a simple circuit; this is what I mean as far as cheaply manufacturable.

Can something I create with the arduino be easily ported to a simpler circuit with with a plain old AVR chip (assuming the circuit + chip have all of the capabilities that I need?)

Other options I have considered for the learning/implementability balance:

Thanks in advance!

  • surveyor
2

Atmel makes some good chips and if you are learning a new chip it would be a good choice. The chip that is in the Arduino (168) can be used as a prototype and then the final code written with minor modifications into a bare 168. As far as I know the SX chips only have assembly and basic programmers.

3

With arduino you could have your first program running in about 5-10minutes on Linux, Mac or windows, the ease of development is pretty hard to beat

It's hard to tell how much power / SRAM / flash you need but the Arduino is very good for development work :slight_smile:

For the final product you can use something like Arduino Pro Mini 168 - 3.3V/8MHz - DEV-08824 - SparkFun Electronics

If you need more power / SRAM / flash you could use an ATmega328 or ATmega644 or something like that

If you need something even more powerful look at AVR32 or ARM

:slight_smile: