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Comment by FuNe | Hacker News Reader

"other MCs aside from the Arduino that are more interesting today" Can you give a few links? Thanks in advance.

The ESP8266 [0] is, in my mind, one of the most interesting things in the microcontroller world right now. It's cheap, small, easy to use, and connects to WiFi.

If you go into real computers, the C.H.I.P.[1] is quite an interesting device. It's $9, which is price competitive with the ATMega644 chip (in single quantities), has WiFi, Bluetooth, and runs Linux. It's also got lots of GPIO, like the Raspberry Pi, so it can be used in places where a microcontroller might normally be used.

I'm sure there are others, but these are the two that are on my radar at the moment.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266

[1] https://getchip.com/

I'm linking to the SparkFun ESP8266 breakout [0] because I found this to be so much easier to get my bearings with than the raw chips/breakouts I'd gotten from Alibaba. Granted, I got my hands on them very early and they were still reverse engineering the documentation on them, but using this dev board has saved me many hours. It's also quite inexpensive for one or two if you're just trying to play around.

[0] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13231

Oh yeah, there's no doubt that you'd need something like this to get started. I figured I'd like to the Wikipedia article because there are so many things being built with this chip that it's hard to point to any one of them and say "this is it". It's really about the ESP8266 itself, what companies like SparkFun are building around it, and, finally, what hobbyists are building with those.

Can also get a WeMos D1 mini on AliExpress for $4 which is essentially the same thing but much smaller, and has lots of shields available.

I've entirely moved from Arduino to the Teensy, which is pretty much entirely software-compatible (excepting pin number changes), but uses an ARM Cortex M4 with 32-bit architecture at up to 96MHz on a much smaller board. The guy who makes them is also incredibly helpful on the support forums and constantly adding new features.

The peripherals are so much better it's comical. Basically all pins capable of 16-bit PWM, having dual 12-bit ADCs, a real DAC, and removing most of the extra junk? Amazing.

Now I just use it as a plug in brain for my custom boards, since it takes all the hardest to solder parts for an entire SoC and puts them in a form factor that's quite small and appropriate power for anything I've wanted to do so far.

https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/

Teensy is great but mostly overkill for the kinds of basic IOT stuff that I find myself doing.

I do want to do a project using a teensy with the audio board for beat detection eventually, but the teensy audio library still doesn't suppert beat detection. Paul posted that he would be adding it a couple of years ago I think, but it currently isn't implemented.

ESP8266 for ~$3 at 160MHz with wifi built-in is such a bargain I can't go past it most of the time, and when I don't need wifi and want to use the Arduino libraries, Arduino pro micros are about the same price and have USB HID support.

It's so great that there are so many great and well-documented options out there nowadays!

Aha, yeah, that does look quite nice. I haven't done a wifi project in a while, but the last one I did [1] I nixed using a wifi chip itself since they didn't have enough PWM outputs. It seems like they've gotten better enough that I could just use the one chip to make my wifi lighting projects vastly simpler.

[1] http://www.instructables.com/id/Ultra-bright-LED-Color-Chang... (things have come a long way since 2010!)

The Particle Photon is pretty awesome: https://store.particle.io/

Program in JavaScript, from a web IDE even. Wireless uploads to the board. $19.

I have one of those and one of the original sparkcore wifi devices (and an electron too #bragging)

They are a really interesting IoT play becoming and MVNO and all!

Also -- they had one of the funniest kickstarter video's i've seen: https://youtu.be/-sP5hn6VDgE

ESP8266[0] springs to mind:

> The ESP8266 is a low-cost Wi-Fi chip with full TCP/IP stack and microcontroller capability...

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266

I messed around with several versions of these and will say they are all sorts of a pain in the ass to get going. The Python stack I was using on them kept crashing when I would put it into power saver mode.

Still, it's pretty cool you can buy one for like $2 and basically have a computer that runs Python with some minimal microcontroller functionality.

I think the software support has improved a lot since I first checked them out about a year ago.

I've only used the Arduino libraries, but I haven't had a problem yet.

Funny that a 160MHz board with wifi built-in can be referred to as "minimal microcontroller functionality" nowadays.

Well, I consider a microcontroller to be controlling something not on board, so yeah. :) It's minimal in that it has two pinouts.

I'm a big fan of the MSP430, which is the only ultra-low-end microcontroller that's not Harvard architecture. That is, code and RAM live in the same address space, which lets you load code at runtime without needing to fiddle about with reflashing.

This allows you to port real operating systems to it:

http://cowlark.com/2015-10-27-fuzix

It's also a really elegant architecture which is a pleasure to write assembly for, and it consumes absurdly small amounts of power.

For a similar market, the ARM Mbed platform is very compelling. You can program a wide range of ARM-based development boards from a browser-based IDE. They provide an Apache-licensed RTOS with comprehensive hardware support. There is an enormous range of compatible hardware, from 16MHz M0 up to 400MHz A9.

https://www.mbed.com/en/

I've been working on a project that's using Adafruit's Feather line extensively and I've been very happy. The ones with the M0 chip are great to work with. Edit: They're using ATSAMD21G18

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