Hello i thinking and wondering What would someone links a bunch of arduino together do? I mean what kind of project could someone use it for? I'm just wondering it got me thinking of what kind of projects can someone use a bunch of arduinos for What would you do with a bunch of arduinos link together?
Then it comes to mind skynet was the only thing i can think of LOL
back in the day, we had scores of PID controllers.
all individual, stand alone doing pretty much the same thing, think 100 incubators, each independently controlled.
one Arduino can control something like 128 SPI shift registers. that is 128 x 8 for things you can turn off and on.
for multiple Arduinos, you could have a mesh network could be used on a farm. water each row of plants, water each line of trees, fill the water trough for the livestock in each pen...
Hello 6v6gt. bitcoin mining i don't know is feasible. I looked into it And someone actually did some bitcoin miner using a due board no longer has the code for it. So i would think it's not really feasible for bitcoin mining Even though i would love to make a arduino bitcoin miner, Even to learn.
IIRC the ArduSat board has 16 328P's and a 2560 that flashed programs to them and they ran experiments on the satellite in orbit. The board is Open Source, the parts are available, someone likely sells assembled, tested working boards somewhere.
A modern car may have 100's of controllers, true of luxury cars 20 years ago. The are AVR chips with CAN bus interfaces just as the Micro and leonardo have USB interfaces.
If you build a robot it makes sense to split tasks into modules run by dedicated controllers. How you connect them can make it fit the bot better or worse.
Even an Uno has SPI bus. That sends/reads 512K Bytes/Sec at default speed, short messages tend to zip. SPI has a Master and Slaves, difference is that all Slaves hear the Master on the MOSI line while the Master only hears 1 Slave (selected by the Master) at a time on the MISO line. Select is by a pin on the Slave held HIGH or LOW.
SD cards run on SPI as do lots of other devices. You need to level 5V down to 3.4V for SD but logging to SD is worth it just don't get a cheap SD module that does a poor job of leveling or start wondering why your SD cards don't last so long as they should. If you run at 3.4V you can run AVR at 8 or 10MHz or ARM at 48 and up MHz.
The Mega2560 makes a good brain controller. It can host external RAM giving 8K stack space and 56K bank-switchable heap. It's got 4 hardware serial ports and many open 8-bit ports.
Look up the Transputer. It started in the 80's and was used to build some massively parallel computers. Each node has 4 highspeed serial ports.
Big computing tends to get done on bigger computers. MCU's are more point of contact devices.
In case of more advanced robots I would expect something like a RPi for the brains (communicating with the world through camera/display/sound, sending high-level commands such as "move forward", "turn right"), and then AVR or other microcontrollers doing things like handling those movement commands, keeping the robot upright, etc.
That should also simplify development a bit, as it splits the work in specific tasks.
Thank you all for letting me know there are endless possibilities for linking multiple arduinos together. A while back maybe 7 or 8 months ago i saw a site that had over 125 arduino uno boards link together. And i forgot what they are doing with that project. But today somehow it popped in my mind i was thinking sbout it and wanted to share with others iin what would they do with linking multiple arduinos together.
I wouldn't want to use Unos to link together in those numbers. That's going to give a huge mess of wires - surely that works much better when using Nanos or Pro Minis and soldering it all together.
In the 80's Cal Tech put 64 IBM PCXT mobos into a 6D hypercube arrangement. It was able to do physics problems that till then only Cray type supercomputers could do though it had about 10% of the power.
Hey GoFoSmoke a friend of mine told me about that. He actually build a system that completed with the Cray computer back then. Not sure what he did. But he build a few super computers back in the early 80s and 90s I also helped him build a few Blade nodes mid 90s.
I could see connecting AVR controlled sub-systems together in some modular growable automation. A 1284P would make a great multi-SD server with lots of buffer space. AVR 168/328 can run all kinds of things even w/o pin multipliers and serial RAM/EEPROM.
In systems where it matters there will be redundant processors running the same code to an answer. If one comes up with a different answer it is considered unreliable and cut out of the loop. I first learned this from guys who were programming 6800 chips for the Delaware Racetrack, early 80's. You don't screw with betters. The system ran solid.
Do you think that modern cars do anything less? The good ones run 100's of MCU's.
I like AVR's because they remind me of 80's 8-bit machines.
Small architecture and tight memory but your code PWNs!
I know of projects where a jump was made to Mega2560 where I would have gone with adding a dedicated 328P to handle certain task(s) would have worked. That got me to thinking about how to spread the code out and between chips comms. For a limited number of chips or boards a serial ring between chips could work, each TX connects to the next RX. Messages literally get passed around until reaching a target that does not echo its own ID. The message says do "this" and if the chip recognizes "this", it does it. Maybe they all do it. There may be data in the message for "this" to use. One chip with buttons and leds may send a message to another with motors and sensors to change a button status by running "this" function. Chips in between won't know "this" but pass the message along. Then the motor/sensor node gets it and click something runs.
I already have an on-the-fly keyword recognizer that tells match just after the final character read or no-match by then. It keeps text and links in tables in flash and runs on minimal RAM. Every chip in the ring would have it with its own keyword list. Every chip handles serial messaging, echoing all with different ID (if ID is the chip, message not sent along) and passing the command to the keyword matcher and running matched function.
This assumed: close-matched tasks run on the same chip, and there is no blocking code.
GoForSmoke I agree with AVR 328p chip aka uno boards i love them my self and have a blast using them. I have used many arduino processors and still find my self using a uno board just as most or sometime more then other MCU out there. It be really cool to see a arduino super computer one day. A lot of people under rate the uno/328p chip Bu i think it can handle the task. Of course it's not a Raspberry pi or a x86 or a 64bit Processor and I'm not comparing them to the Uno board. But i think it can do many things. One thing i would look into for a Summer project is maybe Linking enough of them. I have a lot of 328p chips. over 200 of them LOL
a 80s arduino super computer sounds great about now
Build something that will sell and uses a few... all I can think of is robot or drone but drones are overdone.
Robot arms, legs and sensors could all use dedicated controllers. Each limb might have strain sensors and accelerometers as well as angle sensors for motion feedback. Pressure on grips can be measured. A hand could require a controller if detailed and functional enough.
Maybe make a local hydroponics or aquaponics controller that can net up with others on Wifi? Any operation could buy as many or few as fit them. With all controllers the same chip, keeping replacements in stock gets easier.
If they're DIP 328Ps then give them the latest bootload (project: make a ZIF chip programmer) and sell on eBay $4 or $5 each. Maybe you hardly sell any, mention they're replacements for Arduino Uno Rev3 socket mounted ATmega328P chip to get more hits.
You could get value out of your chips and so can others.
80s arduino super computer sounds great about now
It's called a Due. The Duino compatible is the Teensy 3.6 clocked 240 MHz with FPU, 256K RAM, 1M flash, USB and microSD on a very small board. Either would be super-class in 1980.