Arduino Announces New Linux Boards in Collaborations with Intel and TI
makezine.com
makezine.com
TI Arduino TRE: 1-GHz Sitara AM335x processor plus an AVR processor for the Arduino side. Includes the Arduino sockets and it looks like an X-Bee socket. This looks like a Beaglebone combined with an Arduino. Ships sometime in Spring of 2014.
Of the two I find the TRE more interesting. Precise control of pins is difficult in Linux where you could be preempted and holding the CPU and counting cycles is frowned upon.
BTW: If anyone invents a time machine, please go back and get the original Arduino header alignment fixed.
If you do, the AM335x offers a subsystem called the PRU that lets you program I/O that runs independently from the core. Kind of like, hmm, a bunch of Little Arduinos inside the Big Arduino.
Solving all that by just bolting an ATMega beside the AM335x isn't the least bit elegant, but Arduino has never seemed to be too bothered about elegance.
Oh, and Debian has a ready made one in the repositories so you don't even have to compile it yourself.
The TRE has all of the arduino signals on a 2x17 0.1" header, the one with a white background around it (which seems to mean 5v-safe / AVR-connected on the TRE). Then there's also the remaining double-row headers, which I'd assume are arranged on a 0.1" spacing in relation to each other, and are possibly a new Arduino standard for a 3.3V-only header layout.
It's still not perfect, though. Personally I wish they had made the new standard headers closer together than the old headers instead of further apart, to make it possible to at least bridge across some of them with a $10 5x5cm PCB (even the existing Arduino header standard is just a bit too large to fit on a 5x5cm board, and that's the standard lowest-price tier at all of the super cheap chinese PCB services). But I guess if you only need access to the Uno-era Arduino pins, you can now fit everything into a ~4.4cm long double header. But it's a double header, so you can't make your 'shield' able to pull double duty by plugging directly into a breadboard, which you could have if there had been two close rows of 5V headers instead of a single double-row.
But it is an improvement, and the form factor does have a history of working, a single double-row header is the basis for the entire Pi-Crust/Plate/Shield ecosystem.
High-resolution photos at http://e2e.ti.com/blogs_/b/toolsinsider/archive/2013/10/03/i...
I found the Arduino Yun [1] to be perhaps the most interesting board (nominally $52) which is a very inexpensive Linux setup with an Arduino adjacent. You can even load sketches over WiFi. Its interesting because you have a much more sophisticated computation engine acting as a glorified serial port for an 8 bit micro.
The parallels to the original microcomputer explosion cannot be over looked. The Altair 8800 was introduced as a "real computer" using chips designed for calculators and embedded systems which engineers could build and use much more cost effectively than the minicomputers available at the time. Here we have Arduinos which have an approachable level of complexity and a cost (< $50 seems to be the trigger point) which makes them useful in the education/hacking role.
On the specific announcements the TRE is the most interesting to me as I've got BeagleBone Black systems (one is running the Hue lights in my office) to Arduinoess and Pies and the "sweet spot" is definitely somewhere in the middle. Not enough pins on the Pi, not enough compute oomph in the Arduino. A number of things then are a blend of an Arduino and a larger system, so the TRE, the Yun fit that niche which the TRE being a more programmable on the Linux side version of the Yun.
[1] http://store.arduino.cc/ww/index.php?main_page=product_info&...
"if you don't like the new ones... just don't buy them"
I didn't say I disliked them. Since I didn't make myself clear: I do wish them well.
I'm working on a rover project that uses Raspberry Pi for WiFi and HD video processing, and Arduino for motor control. Best of both worlds. The TRE board sounds perfect if it can come in at a similar price point.
arduino will still be the popular cheap diy go to board. this is for projects that were impossible with the current one. so not making the original more complex, but tapping other markets
(image of beagle) + arduino = (image of new arduino board)
I bet it is because, as the article says, that board was developed together with TI.
TI is trying to get hold of this market for some time... beagle, launchpad, etc. heck, i even got my beagle bone and a few launchpads for free from them.
I think IT having those boards and making them cheap, is like Microsoft not caring about pirated windows outside of the US in the 90s. It creates the ecosystem with 'users' who drives large volume sales later?
I recently discovered an emulator online of my first 8-bit computer (the Compucolor II), and I was amazed at how simple it was to use (draw graphics to the screen, read from the keyboard or disk etc). Whilst you have to write all of the high-level processing yourself, the actual low-level magic is right there at your fingertips. Want to set a pin on the serial port - not a problem, the I/O is memory mapped, and the address you need is in a table in the 100 page manual that came with the computer. Done! Compare that with today's environments - find out the API needed to access a serial port pin (if it even exists!), pull in the system headers and libraries necessary (after figuring out which are used!), modify your build system to use them, and then run.
The beauty of Arduino is that it takes you back to that bare metal simplicity. It makes interfacing to the real world very easy. If you want to run a webserver it's probably not the best choice, but if you want to switch off your washing machine because a sensor has detected that a pool of water has formed on your kitchen floor, Arduino is so much more accessible for an amateur. I really don't understand where the manufacturers are going with these boards...
Intel had released the Minnowboard (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/199-4-...) which seemed like a competitor to the Raspberry Pi, but at 200USD it wouldn't see nearly the uptake the more affordable systems have seen.
This reminds me of the Netbook arms race except the end product is infinitely more useful.
Netbooks have tremendous utility to a subset of users. I have an old netbook with one of the slowest CPUs released in the past decade (Atom Z520), but it gets great battery life, and runs Emacs, Python, and a number of other tools I need like a champ.
Is that what most people want? No. But most people aren't microcontroller hardware hackers either.
I have a Beaglebone Black and a Wandboard Quad sitting on my desk right now and I'm sure I'll end up grabbing the new Arduinos when they come out, although Spring 2014 is pretty far away and I suspect the UDOO will end up doing everything I want soon.