68 thoughts on “Arduino MEGA Is Official

  1. Uncle Sam, lean English. Please! By the way your tiny dick has nothing to do with anything, unless you want to fuck a micro controller. If you do not want to fuck a micro controller with pointy pins and poisonous lead and all, may I suggest you go fuck yourself? This is not retard.com. You may, however want to go there to comment. Do have a nice day.

  2. Are you mentally retarded or something? Get your mind out the gutter. Seriously all you did was say something useless and idiotic about Europe’s ass. The topic is ardino mega. There are plenty of sites about talking about peoples asses’. You my friend are a disgruntled not so sharp jack ass who has nothing better to say than lame as fuck comments. Cheerio was a misnomer. Gee you wonder why I called your dick small. Because it is the easiest way to piss you off. You think I am the one with trouble thinking?

    Get the fuck out retard you do not belong. You have nothing meaningful to say, not to mention, relevant. Do at least learn what English is before you attempt to slander people with it. Pathetic shrew.

  3. I just ordered the new Mega board. First of all, coz it has 4(!) serial ports, a lot of IO pins and coz it’s fucking awesome.

    And for all of you cheap arses, that think this is a waste of money, just think of a BIG project, that needs alot of pins and think of using a Mega vs. many Duemillanoves.

  4. But will it still be slower using compiled code than a slower chip using hand-tuned assembly? The one thing that I felt made the arduino less useful than a *normal* microcontroller is that the arduino has to have the digital output states changed one-by-one. Setting 8-bits of output could take 16 times longer than on a similarly-clocked chip that can use byte-width port writing.

    Yeah, I’m a big PIC loser…Er, user. They’re expensive and inconsistent to program, but the programming itself is easy.

  5. Setting 1 pin with direct IO is about 35 times faster than going through the ardunio abstration.
    http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1237614756/4#4
    Not really surprising as toggling pins is a fundamental task of a microcontroller.

    It’s a bit of a moot point because arduino is just a particular avr running at 8 or 16mhz. Not only that but the toolchain is the common avr-gcc with a function library and some preprocessor magic.

    If the ardunion pin functions are too slow just acess the port direct as you would if using avr-gcc without ardunio.

  6. ArtemisGoldfish: “Yeah, I’m a big PIC loser…Er, user. They’re expensive and inconsistent to program, but the programming itself is easy.”

    I dont understand , where you see Pic more expensive than avr ? most expensive chip from 16F family cost $4.52 from 18F family $8.44 and from 24F $4.83 even most expensive from dsPIC33 DSC Product Family cost $5.91. how this can be expensive ? ATMEGA1280 cost 15 $ and there is no chip from microchip which cost even half of this price

  7. 1) No one is forcing anyone to buy arduinos (mega or normal) instead of bare AVRs or ARMs or whatever you want.

    2) The Arduinos have enough profit margin built to support a two-tier distribution scheme (one wholesale manufacturer, many distributors.) On the whole, I think that’s a good thing.

    3) Here on hack-a-day, I see there are 89 stories in the Arduino category. Compare to 3 non-arduino stories for ATmega128 (none for 1280) and 1 for STM32. That says rather a lot, I think. Using Arduino (or a board like Arduino) lets one focus their attention on a higher level of hack; not everyone wants to spend time designing basic microcontroller layouts and PCBs.

    4) Another advantage of using an arduino is reproducability. Publish a hack based on Arduino, and chances are better that someone else (even of lesser hacker caliber) can make it too. That’s not always the goal, but it can be useful.

    5) on Performance, you have to separate the Arduino libraries from the gcc compiler used. As the referenced thread shows, using the Arduino single-pin writes can be 35 times slower than the minimum pin toggle time of the underlying AVR. However, you CAN achieve that same high-speed toggle without leaving C. That’s one of the nice things about arduino that attracts the more advanced hackers; you use the “easy” functions if you want, or you can completely bypass them (unlike Stamp or PICAXE (?), for example.)

  8. Yes, you’re all right. The Arduino fans are right that it’s easy to develop for and that this board has a much better price per IO channel than the previous board. The people complaining about the price are right that the Arduino team seems to be padding their profit margins on this product compared to the previous one when you look at total component cost (assuming the PCB for this new board costs the same to produce as the PCB for the old board).

    What I want to know is, what’s so wrong with people pointing out that the Arduino team might be gouging prices compared to the profit margins they were making on the old board. It’s the truth (or, at least, appears to be based on present knowledge). Let the thread readers make up their minds as to whether it’s acceptable or not and stop acting like children/fanbois whining about “those mean price complainers”.

  9. Estimated Arduino Mega costs in QTY 5000

    PCB .60
    Crystal .20
    Capacitors .80
    Resistors .20
    Led’s .25
    Connectors 1.20
    FTDI chip 2.50
    ATMEGA1280 8.50

    Subtotal: parts: 14.25
    SMT Soldering: 2.00
    Through-hole soldering: 2.00
    Bootloader Burning: .50
    Quality control: .75
    Packaging .25
    Distribution labor 1.00

    Estimated total 20.75
    50% Markup (Mfr profit) 10.00

    Price offered to retailers: about $30 USD.
    Retailer Markup: 50% or so, to $55-60 USD.

  10. +1 to misterB your bang on this is exactly the point :)
    50% is not a big markup in the retail sector.

    All you moaners sounds like a lot of people who don’t know how business works! If you want them at cost, Make them yourself…..oh no hang on a minute. YOUR NOT CLEVER ENOUGH!!

Leave a Reply to ArtemisGoldfishCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.