Member of Club200 8/3/2000 202.4mph 1999 “built” Hayabusa

I don’t like arduinos or pics and I’ll tell you why: $10 for a bare bones arduino stamp? I can get the atmega168 in an arduino for about $4 and some projects don’t need that much power; infact a lot of the projects I see that use a $30 arduino can be made using a $1.50 attiny. kudos to the arduino for being an open source design, but for $1.50 I can still use the same great development tools you use on the arduino. I used to use pics. I started right when the first flash based pics came out. they were ok and at the time were the only option for hobbyists, but like many others I grew tired of ‘free trial’ compilers and windows only software. atmel stole microchips idea and did it right: cheap versitile microcontrollers that don’t need any external parts to operate and open source cross platform development tools. my avr programmer cost $23 it uses a USB connection (who has a printer port these days?) and I can develop on any os I like. and since avr-gcc is open source I’m free to sell anything I make without any legal concerns.

BTW:
I’m more of a cafe guy myself but crotch rockets are not toys any more then a handgun is a toy. they just get a bad rep ’cause they look so silly.

@KYLE: true, but i still made mine all myself. Saying that, i did buy the touch LCD, but i stripped it and made the housing / rest of it.

@BILL ROWE: im half tempted to ditch the dash and go for something sleek. Ive been looking around for a way to make my own custom LCD. get the crystals fabricated to my requirements. Alas, thats hugely expensive, but the chinese will do it.
Im half deciding to get some sort of ~5″ LCD with a back light. Would make power requirements drop, and open a few more options ive been thinking of if i fab my own driver unit.

@FunkyGibbon:

It works with all your regular components (sensors, leds, lcds, etc).

At its most basic, its really just a way to get a microcontroller into a project while abstracting away some of the details of doing so.

There are a lot of clones and such out there, but they’re mostly based off of the same atmega chip, and in the end, have pretty much the same functionality (digital i/o, analog i/o, serial com, and software control over that i/o).

The duemilanove (~$35) is the one i’ve been developing/breadboarding with, but I just ordered a couple duinostamp kits (~$10) which are pretty minimalistic. I’ll be using these to implement my finalized designs.

Both the AVR and PIC have their limitations – almost everything needs additional hardware. For that matter they don’t come with LEDs or LCD displays.

But I can do the Arduino on linux, mac, or windows.

I just looked at the datasheet of the 16f877 – I see nothing there that would be better at any automotive bus I know of (J1850 of either flavor, CAN, or ISO9141/14230). All would need hardware and software.

The chips are more similar than different. I happen to be using an AVR at work and found the opensource tools, but if the same were available for the PIC I would probably be using one of those instead.