[time-nuts] Super cheap AVR USB boards

Steve iteration69 at gmail.com
Sun Feb 26 23:08:25 UTC 2012


On Sun, 26 Feb 2012 23:42:46 +0100
Attila Kinali <attila at kinali.ch> wrote:

> On Sat, 25 Feb 2012 21:25:48 +0000 (UTC)
> cfo <xnews3 at luna.kyed.com> wrote:
> 
> > Just ordered 10 of each (max)
> > £4
> > http://www.modtraders.co.uk/minimus-avr-usb-development-board.html
> > 
> > £6
> > http://www.modtraders.co.uk/minimus-32-avr-usb-development-board.html
> 
> I you want to do uC development, why not get one of the STM32
> Discovery boards? They come with a USB debuger interface on board,
> and you have a 32bit uC to work with. Yes, they are a little bit more
> expensive and a bit more bulky then the AVR, but when doing one of a
> kind devices, where development time (ie our free time) is at a
> premium, the simplification in development a 32bit uC gives you is
> quite substantial. (you don't have to worry about limited address
> space, or limited speed or limited resources... just use it)
> 
> I just bought two STM32F4 discovery boards (the newer Cortex-M4
> variant) from mouser (with a few other stuff) and got free shipping
> to Switzerland. It can't get much cheaper than that :-)
> 
> 				Attila 
> 

I develop with micro's ranging from 128bytes sram, 2048bytes flash, up
to arm soc's with several gigabytes of flash and hundreds of megabytes
of sram, complete with OS.

I personally prefer the smaller micros because they are challenging,
and provoke a different kind of thinking than if i were to use a
soc board with an OS. Large and small each have their own application,
and reasoning. Sometimes limitations can be a source of inspiration
and allow us to find solutions to problems we would have never known to
exist otherwise. Likewise, the abstraction of larger devices should not
be avoided either as it teaches us how to implement and manage a complex
solution.

In short, I highly recommend that everyone own, use, and contribute to
both large and small devices alike.

Steve



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