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Comment by tecleandor | Hacker News Reader

Well, it's all solved problems, but the cheapest temp controlled Weller is over USD 200, and the Pinecil is 25.

The almost ubiquitous accessibility of cheap miniature general purpose microcontrollers/CPUs allows easy and fast creation of a device like the Pinecil, with a miriad of features: programmable PID, motion sensor, Bluetooth controller, temp profiles, battery powering, calibration, easy access to code... Cheap and fast. And it feels durable, not a toy.

And, if you don't have a FTDI UART converter or a logic analizer around, you just take an RP2040 from your electronic parts bin, and reprogram it. And once you finish, you can reprogram it for a different thing.

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To be fair, everyone who is into MCUs has a USB serial converter lying around, if not several. Or more snarky: repurposing a RP2040 is only free if your time has no value.

I really hate this argument about how your time has no value if you do something that others may consider "Solved problems.", "Boring thing to work on." or whatever argument people can come up with.

God, this is a website full of "Hackers" and all 90% of the users can think of is how to get the most money out of the things they do.

Yeah, I hate this. My time has tons of value when I do stuff I don't want to do. Hacking RP2040s into a UART controller so I can talk to my soldering iron? I'd pay for that.

I agree. If you're enjoying your time it has value.

> To be fair, everyone who is into MCUs has a USB serial converter lying around, if not several.

I can understand why you would think that, but I can also tell you that I didn't buy a serial connector until years after I started playing with microcontrollers.

I've never used a stand-alone one.

I've got Arduino sketches I can quickly flash onto an Uno (or my 2016 HiFive1 320 MHz RISC-V board, which is usually closer to hand) to do all manner of things including UART, flashing a bare AVR chip e.g. ATTiny85 (now supplanted by CH32V003) and so forth.

Same principle as using a Pico.

Well, I used to have one or two around while doing smaller MCUs years ago, but I stopped using them once all the smaller esp8266 and esp32 started coming with one included in the board, but yes, it's not unusual. The difficult part is finding them after years of not using them ;-)

Running the Embassy RP2040 USB CDC ACM serial example takes about 5 seconds on a Pico.

https://github.com/embassy-rs/embassy/blob/main/examples/rp/...

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