Arduino users?

I point folks that express an interest in learning embedded development towards the Arduino. Gives them the chance to get the flavor of embedded work without having to find a JTAG pod or bootloader, figure out the clock tree, read through umpteen pages to learn how to configure a pin as an output (and don't forget to turn on power/clock to the GPIO peripheral!), etc.

For a one-off hobby-style project, it's a fine platform (modulo as always size, speed, capability) if you don't want to mess with a breadboard or don't have a "header board" that's a better fit.

I've said before: it's over-packaged. For proofs-of-concept, or for one- offs to drive test jigs and such things, I love Arduini. For a final design, I find that the baked-in design decisions start to get in the way, and eventually it's time to do a custom board. And the expense, too.

Mel.

And a good thing about the AVR is that much of the range _is_ available in PDIP so prototyping a circuit is rather easy and a hobbyist does not have to go to pre-packaged boards like Arduino, or start designing and assembling PCBs, in the same way you have to do when working with ARM.

Simon.

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Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP 
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world

I am on a strict no-AVR diet these days. Never again.

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Les Cargill

They're pretty limited. I am using a Cubie board and looking towards a Beagle board down the road. There are just so many USB peripherals and interfaces that work with them these days. If nothing else, you can do a heck of a lot of prototyping with the little ARM boards.

The Cubie works like an eval board for the Allwinner ARM stock, but I'm not 100% sure about Allwinner as a chipmaker. Hence the look towards Beagle.

Frankly, they're cheap enough to use just as a terminal server.

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Les Cargill

I have used AVR 8-bit on a few products. Good enough for what I was doing.

I do not like the Arduino IDE, as there is no debugger or jtag interface.

But, I do like PIC18 for 8-bitters.

This one uses the Arduino form factor so I can use many Arduino shields.

hamilton

I'd be curious as to how difficult it would be to use Arduino hardware /without/ using the Arduino run-time environment.

What I'm thinking of is: - take any of the many Arduino processor boards - add whatever shields/peripherals are relevant - program in plain old C against the bare metal - use Arduino libraries to setup the hardware

Why? Because it would avoid me having to learn what can /and can't/ be done in the Arduino run-time environment. Examples: - using sleep modes for very low mean battery current consumption - multi-threaded RTC application

Background is that I recently build a glorified real-time clock calendar with personalised information that runs off a couple of AA cells for several months. I used the AVR IDE and AVR Dragon, which was pleasant enough except that it required Windoze. (No idea whether it could run under Win8, and quite frankly I don't care).

AVR works, but you can't stick your hand in the same river twice with them.

Granted, that's not unique to AVR, but I got bit by that on AVR.

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Les Cargill

Apparently not difficult. I've seen signs on Adafruit and maybe BoingBoing that people are doing that. Seems you can use the Arduino serial bootloader to download any binary code, and if you have a native AVR programmer you can replace the bootloader. And I believe there may be a sketch to program an Arduino to be a native AVR programmer. I haven't tried this. I may be wrong.

Thing for me is that if I must start soldering, I can put an ATmega onto a board for $10 or less. Not $30.

I think openocd will work with the Dragon. See . There's a lot there we all already know, but the rest seems to be from the horse's mouth.

Mel.

I'm sure you can simply ignore the bootloader, or alternatively merely use it to boot into your own code. (Same advantage as MSDOS: once you'd loaded your program, it stayed out of the way unless you used the BIOS functions!)

But what do the various Arduino libraries presume about the runtime environment? I never bothered to find out.

Yes, but avoiding having to design and build the i/o gubbins on the various shields has its attractions in some circumstances.

Having said that, for the project below, I also decided to have fun finding out how to build a double-sided PCB using the laser printer resist technique :)

I had a quick hack trying to get the environment working under Linux, but at the first sign of aggro I rapidly gave up and took the easy Windoze path :( Root cause may well have been an almost-but-not-quite- obsolete version of Ubuntu LTS. Maybe I'll choose to skin that cat another time.

Not very. I've tried it a few times (using AVR-Ada) without any real problems once I had managed to compile AVR-Ada hosted on my development platform (Debian). I've never cared to try the official Arduino IDE.

Greetings,

Jacob

The Arduino IDE is just a front end to the GCC tool chain. You can go outside the sketch language which is just a C subset. If you look the predefined functions are just a collection of C++ classes to make the peripherals easier to use. The sketch is run through the C preprocessor to expand the Arduino stuff and then sent to the GCC AVR G++ and linker.

You can access the I/O registers directly using the standard AVR mnemonics (remember it goes through the standard tool set). I wrote code that was mostly Arduino with a few direct register accesses and an interrupt handler to handle a case where the base pin I/O and polling was too slow.

You can also use the IDE to develop for smaller chips (ATtiny 24 and 25 series for example). You can then load a sketch into the Arduino to use it as a hardware programmer and download the code into the ATtiny. The programmer sketch is included as one of the sample programs. See

for ATtiny development.

As far as using the Arduino directly as an imbedded processor, I would probably not do that unless all the functions were needed. Using it for development and then a smaller board (or even smaller chip) may be more practical. If you are actually using most of the Arduino functions smaller form factor boards are available for the classic Arduino. For example I developed an IR remote decoder using the Arduino and IDE. I then loaded the code into an ATtiny85 for the end use (I only needed a couple of I/O lines decoded).

Can you elucidate what happened? We are wrestling with ATMegas (328 and

1284) right now and it's painful. Unfortunately they started with the Arduino IDE and somehow the things don't behave consistently. But we haven't gotten to the root cause just yet. [...]

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Within each AVR MCU variant, are the AVR fuses set to the same values ?

Simon.

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Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP 
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world

They did correct the libraries accordingly. But who knows, the Arduino IDE is a bit mysterious in that respect. Sometimes a system works fine for a few hours and then crashes. Other times it didn't even boot or needed a few firmware re-loads.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

The "fuses" are configuration bits in eeprom, they can indeed be a source of inconsistent behaviour.

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John Devereux

Is it possible that fuses become partially "undone" or partially set? We've had cases where everything worked well and after a few hours or days the ATMega would seem to slowly "die". Reprogramming brought it back, most of the time.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

If I had to consider such a possibility in one of my projects, I would:

1) use avrdude in CLI mode to first manually verify the fuses were set to the same values for all devices within the same AVR MCU variant (and I would read the fuse documentation in the Atmel docs to make sure those values made sense).

2) Run my application until it failed again.

3) After failure, once again use avrdude in CLI mode to manually verify the fuse settings were unchanged from step 1.

Can you do the same with whatever tools you are using ?

Simon.

PS: I've never experienced AVRs slowly dying even with the homebrew AVR flash programmer setup I have. I have managed to kill them outright when the programmer failed on _very_ rare occasions, but I have never seen a slow failure. Have you tried another type of programmer ?

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Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP 
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world

Good idea. But they'd have to get their hands around AVR-Dude. Right now they are using the serial port programmer that comes with Arduino. Which requires this hokey "capacitor in the air" at the reset pin.

Unfortunately not. Arduino seems to be very restricted in the diagnostic area :-(

No, this is a client far away and their main strength isn't really programming. But we are in the process of moving everything away from Arduino. This includes using professional uC contractors, something that I am really not.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/