The New Altair: Why the Arduino Matters | Hacker News Reader

The New Altair: Why the Arduino Matters

urbanhonking.com

52 pointsatduskgreg32 comments

As one of the creators of Arduino (and currently its lead software developer), I'm happy to see such a lively discussion of the platform. I'd also love to hear any suggestions you might have for improving it.

I should note that we've done very little promotion ourselves, apart from teaching lots of people to use it in various workshops. Of course, we're happy that Make is such a fan.

One interesting feature of the platform that hasn't been mentioned here is the fact that the whole thing (hardware and software) is open-source. We've had lots of people take the Eagle (CAD) files and design their own custom variants, which creates a vibrant ecosystem.

Finally, if anyone wants to get involved and help make Arduino better, check out our developer pages at: http://code.google.com/p/arduino/

There's two things you've (plural) done here then I'm very grateful for: USB and OSX software.

I've a birthday coming up soon, so I've just been showing my wife these ;) Thanks.

I think you should start making boards based upon the AT90USB162 processor. USB capabable, cheap micros are increasingly important for new products.

Other than that, good work! I am a fan.

Way oversold. The Arduino is a nifty AVR microcontroller board, no more and no less. It's distinguished from other such things that have appeared over the years (anyone remember the BASIC Stamp?) only by price (cheaper, but not much cheaper) and integration (it has a USB device plug and a reasonably attractive IDE).

It's not breaking any ground that hasn't been a four-lane highway for the last two decades. But it's cute and cheap, and if you're interested in playing with embedded stuff or hardware control, I'm sure it's a lot of fun.

But "the next Altair?". Please.

In their defense, it's not claiming to "break ground" any more than the PC broke ground over the mainframes at the time.

But as a software hacker wanting to move to meatspace, what do you suggest as better?

90% of everything that I've seen done with the Arduino (that doesn't require portability) can be done with an old PC that has a parallel port and any Linux distro that has gcc.

I'm not dissing the Arduino; I think it's an interesting platform, but it really is overhyped.

a PC doesn't have analog inputs, cant do PWM outputs, struggles with protocols like i2c, isnt realtime. but it is: loud, hard to enclose nicely, costs more and requires maintenance.

And none of what you've said falls into the 90% of what I've seen done with an Arduino.

I feel the Arduino is little overhyped. It isn't too hard to build your own PIC or AVR programmer on a veroboard and start hacking. I find the BeagleBoard to be a lot more promising/interesting given the amount of raw processing power you get on a tiny 3"x3" board.

I definitely agree that the BeagleBoard is really interesting as well. I've got some friends working on a building an incredibly simple OS that would be used for education and tinkering. However, if you don't think the barrier to entry of having to build a board from scratch and jump over all the other proprietary hoops for working with PIC keeps out lots of people -- from programmers and other non-hardware geeks to artists, designers, kids, teachers, etc. -- you need to work on increasing your empathy with people who aren't you.

"It isn't too hard to build your own PIC or AVR programmer on a veroboard and start hacking. "

Actually, it is. People who are 'starting hacking' dont know how to hack, so they dont clock, power or wire their chips correctly. They don't have a scope so its impossible to debug, especially when there are multiple unknowns (power, clock, wiring, programmer, progammer driver, programming software, compiler, code)

"I find the BeagleBoard to be a lot more promising/interesting given the amount of raw processing power you get on a tiny 3"x3" board."

I like the BB too. But am puzzled as to why people compare it to Arduino. They are completely different things (computer vs microcontroller dev board) I can't think of any projects that really intersect between the two. BB can't do even the most basic things that an Arduino does, like blink LEDs or drive a servo. And of course, an Arduino cant do real time video processing

Ladyada, I think the reason that people compare it to Arduino is not so much because it's in the same category (which it's obviously not), but because it seems to be bringing the "Arduino philosophy" to the low-level ARM/embedded Linux sphere. As someone who went from zero embedded device hacking to some fluency because of Arduino, the Beagle Board seems exciting because it has the chance of opening up that related space to me as well.

Well, I think I was being a little elitist. I guess there's this tendency among people like me which goes like "I was forced to learn things the hard way and hence its good to learn things hard way".

But back when I started, I was just a cash strapped high school kid who happend to find a couple of PIC16F84s. And I had lots of fun building a simple parallel port programmer and playing with them.

My next pet project involves a beagle board and 4 AT2313s driving 4 brushless motors. Just waiting for my beagle board. The beagle board does have a couple of GPIOs and 3 PWMs, so blinking an led or driving a servo should be possible :)

Depends entirely on what you want to do in "meatspace", of course. There are lots of options for, say, robot control out there. Hacking one's Roomba seems popular. If you have a spare laptop or netbook, there are huge numbers of USB-based interface devices you can use to deal with the outside world without even leaving the comfort of your PC.

And, when you're ready for "serious" work (something other than turning lights and motors on and reading sensors at 10 Hz), you'll probably want to be looking at FPGA development boards and learning Verilog or VHDL. Take a look at the products from http://knjn.com for example.

You sound exactly like the people criticizing the Altair when it first arose. How many elementary school kids or design students or Ruby programmers ever hacked the Basic Stamp? Whether it be historical coincidence or simply passing some minimal threshold of price/ease-of-use, these small improvements sometimes result in dramatic epochal changes.

> How many elementary school kids or design students or Ruby programmers ever hacked the Basic Stamp?

I think the answer across the three categories is probably above 10,000. The Arduino is sweet and the development environment is better than what Parallax supplied, but I think you're overstating the case. I think it would be fair to say that Basic, as typically used on a Basic Stamp, is substantially less complicated than Ruby.

Maybe above 10,000 if you aggregate over the entire multi-decade period that the Basic Stamp has been around. Maybe. Also, BASIC the programming language may be simpler than Ruby, it may even be simpler that C/C++ that you program the Arduino in. But it's still much harder to get starter programming a Basic Stamp and much harder to get it to do anything useful. How long would it take an intermediate PHP programmer with no previous electronics experience to build a device that posted a tweet whenever they pressed a button using a Basic Stamp? With an Arduino and the right shields, that project would take less than an hour including downloading the IDE and getting everything configured.

For embedded programming (twiddling digital I/O, motor control, and the like), I think the Arduino and the Basic Stamp are comparable in ease of use, or at least in the same ballpark. I've used both; I'm not just making this up.

On the other hand, you're entirely right about Ethernet connectivity. Making a Basic Stamp tweet is somewhere between nontrivial and impossible.

Still, I don't think that the Arduino is miles ahead of its competitors. It's definitely sweet for small projects with limited I/O, storage, and bandwidth requirements. There are lots of embedded Ethernet boards that offer comparable performance/price ratios. To me, the Arduino seems slightly ahead in ease of use for beginners, but that's about it.

(Edit:) As competitors, I'd offer:

  http://makezine.com/controller/
  http://www.rabbit.com/products/
  http://www.gumstix.com/store/catalog/index.php
  http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/index.php

They're all harder to use than an Arduino, but I think they win on performance/price. And they're not that hard to use. The Make controller, in particular, is quite easy.

Those are all cool boards, but they are dramatically more expensive 3-10x and harder to get started with. I've used BASIC Stamp as well and so am not "making this up either". When I was first getting started with physical computing stuff, I tried to use BASIC Stamp and ran into quite a large number of difficulties. While the BASIC language is relatively straightforward, the installation/first run story is full of bad pitfalls. And BASIC Stamp also forces you to know a lot more about [edit: PIC not AVR] architecture in order to accomplish the basic things. Again, these obstacles aren't that big for programmers/more experienced EE-types, but for regular people they are deal breakers.

Sorry-- I didn't mean to imply that you were making anything up. I was saying that I was speaking from experience.

By performance/price, I mean the ratio of performance to price. You're right that the boards I cite are 3-10x more expensive, but they're also more powerful by a similar factor.

When did Parallax switch to the AVR architecture? Last time I used a Basic Stamp, it was a PIC.

Oops, you're right it is a PIC not an AVR. Just a typo/brain-o on my part (I've corrected it in my above comment, thanks). Obviously there are steps up from the Arduino in terms of power. Just like there were "real" Unix-caliber mainframe systems available in 1975 when the Altair launched. and likewise, the Arduino-compatible boards are getting more powerful every day, cf the new Arduino Mega as well as the Illuminato. The core of my argument is of the "there's always room at the bottom" type. Without a smooth newbie-to-expert curve, the existence of more powerful and flexible systems is just a frustration to users who are locked out of the whole domain for lack of a starting point. I don't think the Arduino is the Last Word in Physical Computing, I think that for a large class of people what's important about it is that it's the first word.

I guess it's all a matter of degree, but to me, the Arduino is less like the Altair, which was not very widely distributed compared to similar computers sold in later years, and more like the Apple II-- a great product, widely distributed, but not the first of a kind. I'd say the PIC 16F84 and a Picstart programmer are more like the Altair than the Arduino is.

I do agree, though, that having entry-level boards that are easy to use is a huge step up for the large class of people you mention.

These boards are not as much competitors to the Arduino, they are upgrades. And they're quite hard to use if you've never done any electronics. Which is why you'll see everyone start with Arduino and then eventually move up.

Besides, if someone's going to fry their first board (and they will), it should probably cost $30, not $100+ The $30 price point is a major bonus that overrides performance/price.

* or one can replace the processor for <$5

Dead on. Also, the main point when you're getting started with physical computing is not the processor, but the actual hardware you can plug into it, the LEDs, buttons, motors, thermistors, etc. One of the Arduino's really big advantages for beginners is that it is relatively "transparent" in terms of cognitive, cost, and setup overhead in this regard. It gets you to actually plugging things into it and seeing them blink the fastest and cheapest by an order of magnitude.

For me, things like the Altair, the Apple IIe and the Arduino were not what they could functionally do for my data or make "my life easier" ... it was what it did to me, personally.

I learned programming and it fundamentally changed my brain: I could issue commands programatically to a piece of hardware and it will do what I tell it to (to a fault).

The point of the Arduino (as seen in modern times) is to change a person's brain in fundamental ways about what computers, hardware and software are, how they interact and what they can do with it. It expands their minds and shows them possibilities and understanding not seen when one just views a piece of hardware as some mysterious entity.

As for what the Arduino can do for this end, it requires a community of dedicated and enthusiastic users as well as hardware and a (software) programmer. A group of people with a diverse set of interests, experiences and educations (artists to engineers and everything in between), the aim of ease-of-use, learning and understanding is required for this kind of excitement and interest.

There was a similar group for PCs but I found my community with the Apple IIe and LOGO for that was what the local user groups were using and what my middle school teacher taught me. Now, the "local" user group is the entire internet. Had I gone to a different school maybe there would have been an assembly community.

In comparison: http://www.xgamestation.com/

Build your own video game system, run atari-esqe games on there. More avenues for fun in my book.

yes, and I highly recommend reading André LaMothe's books (xgamestation's sole creator) and his posts on the xgamestation forum (user necron). He's an highly skilled hacker and entrepreneur.

The xgamestation products seem good, but the website is awful. I've been there on and off several times over the years and never purchased anything because I've given up. There's now quite a few different products, but not a good overview of the differences. And the faux game look and feel is tedious and hard to read. View -> Page Style -> No Style helps somewhat.

agreed, the arduino is oversold in and of itself. However it does remove the need for a separate programmer board/aparatus and a simple language. The ease of just using USB is a win along with a mixed community of experts, amateurs and kids. The synergy and accessibility is the main point of the article IMHO.

You got it exactly. I'm not arguing that the Arduino is going to be sitting on office desks or pants pockets everywhere, but that whoever invents the thing that is will have cut their teeth and learned what works on an Arduino.

Arduino is the Python of dev boards in that Python has an explicit goal of "batteries included" -- to include everything you need to be productive right away. Ironically, in the case of Arduino, batteries are technically not included, but that's because you get power directly from USB. :-) But metaphorically, Arduino is as "batteries included" as Python.

No, the New Altair is Lego Mindstorms http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-4494799-Mindstorms-NXT/dp/B000E4F...

Expensive? Yes. Underpowered? Yes. Thriving community? Yes. Read the reviews (there's a few hundred of them) and see the number of kids for whom this is their first intro into programming. It's an awesome piece of kit

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