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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

OTOH things which belong on microcontrollers are now being pushed back to microcontrollers for cost reasons, so there is a win to be found there.

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Even before the hikes, SBCs were $50-$100 a pop, compared to pennies for basic MCUs and maybe $4 for high-performance ones. People were clearly willing to pay 100x more just for familiarity and the ecosystem ("hats", forums, etc). I don't know if 300x is going to make more hobbyists see the light, or just result in fewer of them being able to afford the hobby?

That's an apples to oranges comparison. Might as well bring up how people pay thousands of dollars for FPGA boards.

No. Many hobbyists default to SBCs whether they need them or not. No one defaults to FPGA if they don't need it.

My point is that the FPGA boards are several orders of magnitude more expensive than the actual chip. To be fair you should be comparing between the cost of the SoC and the microcontroller.

> People were clearly willing to pay 100x more just for familiarity and the ecosystem

This is obviously logical. If I know how to program in Python or JS but not C and am familiar with SSH, I can do something with a SBC in a few minutes.

I get paid $200/hr. If I spent even one hour to learn what I need to deal with a microcontroller, the time cost is four times the cost of materials if I stick with what I know.

How many small projects do I need to do in my free time before it's financially smart to learn a whole new technology?

With LLMs, it's potentially a lot easier to use microcontrollers now, depending on how widely available the documentation is now.

As if it would make sense that spending 2hrs relaxing on the beach or gardening your orchids would cost $400 to you. Money not made is not money spent. If you were doing a hobby project for learning, you were not going to be working during that time anyways, so your hourly rate doesn't matter.

Microcontrollers don't really make sense for hobbyists (unless their hobby is programming microcontrollers, of course). They only make sense when you think about deploying an application at scale, at which point the per-unit price becomes important. OTOH, if your hobby project goes viral and you want to profit from selling SBCs with it preinstalled, a cheaper SBC is a plus, but that's not very likely to happen...

Most of the "professional" microcontrollers have complicated flashing schemes, expensive bespoke IDEs, and limited language support. Treating a lot of that like a moat around their products.

I find it remarkable that they haven't tried to make all of that easier. Any board with arduino support is easy to start using, with pared down c++, boards similar to the micro:bit support micropython and javascript as well as a few others, and a ton of modern development boards have UF2 support.

UF2 is a step change in how easy it is to flash a binary onto a microcontroller. You hold down a button before connecting it to a USB port, and then it appears as a USB drive for you to drop a file onto, once it's done "copying" the board is flashed and will run your code as soon as it resets.

If you want to gain familiarity with a board, you can drop a .uf2 file with a REPL on it and run code on the board a line at a time.

Yeah, never understood why I would want an entire OS running just to blink an LED. I was going to make a pro-Arduino comment but I guess my LED example warrants little more than an R/C circuit and a transistor, ha ha.

(Anyway, I still remember the thrill of writing assembly for a 68HC11 and getting a pair of hobby servos to respond.)

Familiarity - it’s easy for us Linux dweebs to build a pi that can flip an LED, but programming an arduino is an entire new area.

It's pretty trivial to do so on Arduino though.

  void setup() {
    pinMode(LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT);
  }
  
  void loop() {
    digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, HIGH);  
    delay(1000);                     
    digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW);   
    delay(1000);                      
  }

Well first you have to learn the Arduino programming language. And the stdlib.

Good thing LLMs exist now

it's literally the hello world of micros. get an arduino, plug it into the usb, install the ide, new -> example -> 01. Blink. Press Run. Cool you have now blunk a led. Now use AI to draw the rest of the owl.

It's easy once you've done it - but before you've done it (for me at least) it was much easier to just install a Linux on a Pi and run a bash script than to learn how to program an Arduino.

(Of course, there are those to whom an Arduino is an overpriced piece of junk and they don't understand how I can't solder a three cent chip myself.)

But let's be realistic - all of these things are like my Steam library - purchases made but never used (I have a drawer full of Pis and other SBCs, and Arduino dev kits, etc. Someday I'll have time time time!).

It's C++, and basically what Arduino gives you is

  int main() {
    setup();
    for(;;) loop();
  }

As well as a GUI to easily flash devices and view the output from the serial port, as well as import libraries that do all of the hard work like say making a serial port on any microcontroller pin or control external devices like light strips or displays.

I'd assume the average user on HN should be able to figure it out pretty easily.

They don't call it C++ because that sounds too difficult. But it's literally, not like a simplified subset that compiles into an IL using a formally proven tool, but as in literally compiled using GCC as, C++.

Calling it c++ might give the wrong impression to some people too, since it doesn't have the STL, rtti, or exceptions for boards like the Uno r3.

It is c++ though. Just limited in similar ways to the US air force's requirements for using the language.

good news, now you can use all that dram you can't afford to vibe code an arduino program. Think of the savings and the learnings!

You're probably joking, but this is interesting. If we throw more RAM at AI, it can help us optimize programs to reduce our RAM needs, I haven't thought about it like that

With micropython or some of the js based frameworks for microcontrollers, it's really not that new/different.Especially with ESP32/Pi Pico W/their clones...

In fact it's a lot more straight forward to not have to deal with Network Manager config files or systemd unit files or read only rootfs headaches of Linux world.

asking as a casual non-poweruser... how does one do that on linux exactly?

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.0/driver-api/gpio/index.h...

You can usually find libraries for your language of choice to speak GPIO and expose the pin's state as a variable in your code.

Mostly for the network stack. Economics, also, sometimes.

These days, with ESP32, Pi Pico W etc... things have changed a lot.

But before they got popular, Why deal with MCU + wiring some weird peripheral for wifi / ethernet when you get a Pi Zero W / Clone with built in wifi for the same price?

For me it's primarily the ability to run a full TCP/IP stack. For hobby projects, I'd rather use a Pi or a Beaglebone with IRC or HTTP for data egress than, say, I2C or SPI. The ease of debugging alone makes it worth it.

How is this a barrier to using a microcontroller? I've sent http requests from many different microcontrollers.

You jest, but I ended up getting a lot of use out of being able to do this in software for a dimmable LED lamp. Dimming the LED required PWM, and the potentiometer resistance -> PWM frequency map ended up fairly intricate to make the knob "feel right."

Now what I would have loved to have done is come up with some crazy analog circuit to implement an arbitrary transfer function from potentiometer input to LED voltage, but I didn't know how to do this at the time and the dev cycle would be a lot more painful than with software.

Yeah, PWM on an Arduino is easy enough (no need for the Pi).

68HC11 would have been a luxury for us.

I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Pi Pico 2W. It can host an access point, a web server, be a USB host, and of course has GPIO. And not running an OS means it’s way simpler.

Agree, but there was something special about SBCs being so cheap they were the default recommendation for new hobbyists and I'm sad to see that go.

I would not have fallen in love with microcontrollers without Raspberry Pi and PocketCHIP as stepping stones.

The messaging of "it's a tiny computer, make whatever you want with it" is so much more approachable than anything I've found on the microcontroller side. Even Arduino. I dismissed it for a long time because I misunderstood it. I thought I had to buy Arduino devices, then Arduino shields, then program them in the Arduino language using the Arduino IDE.

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