pbrouwer:
My coffeemaker has one in it, I also found one in a printer once. I guess there are plenty of applications where a more simple chip is, well, too simple. A mega 2560 might just be enough to do the job, an ARM chip might be overkill. Also, if a company already has a line of products based on AVR's, they may not want to switch. On the other hand, I've seen a company spend $100.000 on rewriting their entire software stack so they could use a micro-controller that was just a tiny bit cheaper (but with a planned production of a million units, those tiny bits do add up).
Your coffeemaker has a 2560 in it? What is it, a Keurig or a thousand-dollar expresso machine? Most coffeemakers cost so little these days I would expect them to be using a ATTiny type microcontroller at most, if they use a microcontroller at all.
Of course not, it's an Arduino expresso machine Next version will use the new Due board.
pbrouwer:
My coffeemaker has one in it, I also found one in a printer once. I guess there are plenty of applications where a more simple chip is, well, too simple. A mega 2560 might just be enough to do the job, an ARM chip might be overkill. Also, if a company already has a line of products based on AVR's, they may not want to switch. On the other hand, I've seen a company spend $100.000 on rewriting their entire software stack so they could use a micro-controller that was just a tiny bit cheaper (but with a planned production of a million units, those tiny bits do add up).
Your coffeemaker has a 2560 in it? What is it, a Keurig or a thousand-dollar expresso machine? Most coffeemakers cost so little these days I would expect them to be using a ATTiny type microcontroller at most, if they use a microcontroller at all.
Of course not, it's an Arduino expresso machine Next version will use the new Due board.
Is that a mockup or do you actually have one of those working? What do you guys do, specialty food service appliances?
Not a mockup, it's a real espresso machine. Arduino is a brand name of a very high end espresso machine manufacture that sells to restaurants and cafes. They predate the company that makes micro-controllers.
So connection to the arduino company we all know and love and no that machine does not have an arduino micro inside it. Just my attempt at a little humor as it seemed topic related.
retrolefty:
Not a mockup, it's a real espresso machine. Arduino is a brand name of a very high end espresso machine manufacture that sells to restaurants and cafes. They predate the company that makes micro-controllers.
So connection to the arduino company we all know and love and no that machine does not have an arduino micro inside it. Just my attempt at a little humor as it seemed topic related.
retrolefty:
Not a mockup, it's a real espresso machine. Arduino is a brand name of a very high end espresso machine manufacture that sells to restaurants and cafes. They predate the company that makes micro-controllers.
So connection to the arduino company we all know and love and no that machine does not have an arduino micro inside it. Just my attempt at a little humor as it seemed topic related.
That's not exactly mine, but it sure looks exactly like it, only the circuit board is the wrong color. Mine came from Netronics also and I built it in high school. 256 BYTES of RAM including "video" memory. Your program was at the top of screen unless you had more RAM to dedicate a full 256 byte page to. RAM cost $100 per K back then, so.... They ran at like 1.76 Mhz with 12 clock cycles per machine cycle and some instructions taking 2 or 3 machine cycles, they weren't the fastest things in the world, but hey it was on your desk for $99 if you could solder. It still works after 35 years.
retrolefty:
Not a mockup, it's a real espresso machine. Arduino is a brand name of a very high end espresso machine manufacture that sells to restaurants and cafes. They predate the company that makes micro-controllers.
So connection to the arduino company we all know and love and no that machine does not have an arduino micro inside it. Just my attempt at a little humor as it seemed topic related.
I read thru that, pretty neat. Guy never posted again, must have been trolling. This is my first computer, still got it: Netronics ELF II
That's not exactly mine, but it sure looks exactly like it, only the circuit board is the wrong color. Mine came from Netronics also and I built it in high school. 256 BYTES of RAM including "video" memory. Your program was at the top of screen unless you had more RAM to dedicate a full 256 byte page to. RAM cost $100 per K back then, so.... They ran at like 1.76 Mhz with 12 clock cycles per machine cycle and some instructions taking 2 or 3 machine cycles, they weren't the fastest things in the world, but hey it was on your desk for $99 if you could solder. It still works after 35 years.
Very cool. And if I recall correctly that RCA chip used a process that was radiation hardened or resistant and was used in space because of that.
That's right lefty. The ceramic packages were radiation resistant and as far as I know there are still some in orbit. It's an awful ugly platform to write code on though. It came with a book written by Tom Pittman (sp?) trying to teach you how to program in assembly language.
It's fairly expensive and has a small number of pins and raw compute power and memory compared to ARM.
It might look that way now. It looks to me like that series of AVRs came out as a logical extension of a well-liked microcontroller line at about the same time as the very first "microcontroller-like" ARM chips were starting to be sold, using a brand new ARM architecture...
If you were designing a product (say, a POS terminal) in about 2005, what do you think the options were then?
Even in the Arduino world, at the time the original Arduino MEGA (m1280 based) was introduced (2009), I don't think that ARM was a particularly realistic alternative. And the MEGA2560 is a pretty lazy upgrade to that (look at how much longer than expected it took Due to show up.)
Atmel has a positive EBITDA, $300 million in cash, $0 in debt. $1.43B in total revenue. You have to sell a lot of cheap microcontrollers to make that kind of money.
Look more closely. Atmel has flirted with (non)profitability over most of its existence, and they lost money in the most recent quarter. http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Atmel_(ATML)/Data/Net_Income
A couple of years ago, they barely resisted a hostile takeover initiated by their arch-rival Microchip...
You still don't get that sort of gross income without selling your microcontrollers to more than just hobbyists.
westfw:
You still don't get that sort of gross income without selling your microcontrollers to more than just hobbyists.
That is obvious. Clearly they sell microcontrollers by the hundreds of millions per year. Good for them, I am on their bandwagon and fanlist (and sampleslist too 8)). I was just wondering how many ATMEGA2560s they were selling and what products they are going into.
westfw:
You still don't get that sort of gross income without selling your microcontrollers to more than just hobbyists.
That is obvious. Clearly they sell microcontrollers by the hundreds of millions per year. Good for them, I am on their bandwagon and fanlist (and sampleslist too 8)). I was just wondering how many ATMEGA2560s they were selling and what products they are going into.
Companies tend to keep such specific sales information proprietorial as I wouldn't think they would not want their competitors to know that information. They do make quarterly profit and loss statements for their shareholders if they are publicly held companies but would not drill down to specific models sales figures.
I can't figure what I'd do with ~80 I/O pins. I'm amazed at how powerful the 8-bit MCUs are, but I'd still think the CPU would run out of horsepower running that much stuff.
I did a breadboard project directly driving 4 8x8 matrices and that pretty much took every pin on an Arduino Mega R3. One of my first once I got the Arduino to work at all and understood input and output well enough to drive LEDs. Why drive 1 LED when you can drive 256? That was before I understood that this was a terrible idea. Current limits? Who would think. I wondered why the thing was so much brighter with one matrix than with four. Hmmm... I lowered the resistor values and it didn't get any brighter. In fact, you don't need resistors at all when you have overburdened the microcontroller to that level. But it never did break down. The voltage regulator got nice and hot though.
You just lack imagination grasshopper. A standard and ever popular 8x8x8 LED cube would work very nicely using up 72 of those pins. Who need's shift registers when I have a 80 I/O pin micro in hand?
[quote author=Jack Christensen link=topic=152098.msg1145517#msg1145517 date=1362596960]
I can't figure what I'd do with ~80 I/O pins. I'm amazed at how powerful the 8-bit MCUs are, but I'd still think the CPU would run out of horsepower running that much stuff.
You just lack imagination grasshopper. A standard and ever popular 8x8x8 LED cube would work very nicely using up 72 of those pins. Who need's shift registers when I have a 80 I/O pin micro in hand?
Lefty
[/quote]
LOL well the cubes are cool enough but I could never get excited enough about the concept to attempt one myself.
LOL well the cubes are cool enough but I could never get excited enough about the concept to attempt one myself.
[/quote]
Well I built a 5x5x5 and found it a very rewarding and challenging project. It built it mostly to see if I could actually write all the code myself from scratch as a stretching exercise to try and bootstrap learning C/C++ and It met all my goals. Although I will admit once I got it working with maybe a half dozen different pattern displays I tired quickly coming up with new patterns, as it is a very manual and mentally labor intensive process. What is needed is a PC based GUI visual pattern generator/editor that one could then down load new pattern displays, all of which is well beyond my programming skills.
[quote author=Jack Christensen link=topic=152098.msg1145517#msg1145517 date=1362596960]
I can't figure what I'd do with ~80 I/O pins. I'm amazed at how powerful the 8-bit MCUs are, but I'd still think the CPU would run out of horsepower running that much stuff.
You just lack imagination grasshopper. A standard and ever popular 8x8x8 LED cube would work very nicely using up 72 of those pins. Who need's shift registers when I have a 80 I/O pin micro in hand?
Lefty
LOL well the cubes are cool enough but I could never get excited enough about the concept to attempt one myself.
[/quote]
Well I built a 5x5x5 and found it a very rewarding and challenging project. It built it mostly to see if I could actually write all the code myself from scratch as a stretching exercise to try and bootstrap learning C/C++ and It met all my goals. Although I will admit once I got it working with maybe a half dozen different pattern displays I tired quickly coming up with new patterns, as it is a very manual and mentally labor intensive process. What is needed is a PC based GUI visual pattern generator/editor that one could then down load new pattern displays, all of which is well beyond my programming skills.
Lefty
[/quote]
I have the same or a similar problem. As soon as I get the hardware running with minimal software, I usually declare victory and don't develop the software any further. I do software during the week. I like designing the circuits, choosing parts, and soldering the stuff together, not more software development. Anyone want to be an unpaid assistant?
Next version will use the new Due board.
