ok so ‘fat nerd’ was a gritty depiction. but this comes after a bitter 3 months of dealing with 3 different sets of (said individuals) who boo-hooed the Arduino for a project, then festered on 90 days of budget cuz they said “it can be done simpler with 555′s” or “Let’s just go PIC with this”. Once I introduced the Arduino, no more time-wasting, and because of the community and other helpful guidelines, the project is successful – without them.

The complaints about Arduino always revolve around ‘cost’ and ‘overkill’.

Cost: You can get an arduino RBBB for $10. For a one-off, the $8 you save building it from a 555 isn’t worth the extra development time. We’re all busy people here.

Overkill: A 555 or PIC based solution isn’t inherently superior to an Arduino solution because they have fewer features. That’s ridiculous, why would you think that?

If you’re building 1000 of something, the extra time spent value engineering to the lowest cost solution is worthwhile. If you want to make it as small as possible or minimize power usage Arduino isn’t a great choice. For the 90% of projects that don’t have these constraints, it’s the best available technology.

@ftorama
Yes is great business. open is not free and visibility is the best power for business.

Do you think that all of this people (Banzi for first) and all of this company (Tinker, Telecom, Wired etc.) work for a buck? I’m not sure, sorry.

And yes Banzi looks like Santa but…I’m saying that Arduino was a great business idea and I’m think that there is something more that openmind people and etichal reason.
I dislike this kind of Arduino’s religion

The wrong thing with Arduino is the price/complexity balance of the projects. Most projects made with Arduino lying around the web are so simple that a low-end mcu like pic12 can do them easily. Pic12: no external crystal required, wide operation voltage range, easy programming… and the best part… CHEAP!!

I came across this link earlier today
http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3339907908/the-cognitive-style-of-unix It deals with the learning curve associated with unix command line.
I think there are parallels to using an arduino vs individual components. There might be a steep learning curve, but you achieve greater results once you progress.

For those who want to move past Arduino, I have written a runtime library for AVRs which was designed to address many of the shortcomings of the Arduino runtime.

It includes:
* Digital I/O
* Timers
* Serial (both busy-waiting and asynchronous)
* External Interrupts
* Servo control
* Analogue to digital
* Hardware PWM
* Gamma correction – calculate on the fly, or lookup tables (recommended)
* Fast synchronous serial shifter
* Software H Bridge for driving naked transistors (with PWM support)
* Realtime Clock & event triggering
* Debouncing (detect button presses, as well as held buttons)
* Software PWM Matrix (for passive LED matrices)
* HT1632 based LED matrix displays such as the Sure Electronics DE-DP105 (search for 0832 led matrix on Ebay)
* HD44780 & compatible LCD character displays

http://www.makehackvoid.com/mhvlib

Never mind this load of tosh. Just pick a processor and read the friggin datasheet.

Oh, and the hostile attitude I get from people when I ask for help — even in the Arduino forums(!) — is very off-putting. I want to learn. I can’t learn if you aren’t willing to teach. Don’t be so elite. You know why people stick to their Arduinos and never grow out of them? Because they’re scared of you. You’re mean to them, they stop trying to grow, and then you laugh at them for not growing.

I would like to share my experience in this matter, as it is pertinent and applicable.

I don’t represent the majority of the people who are said to use the Arduino. I am no an artist or electronics noob. I am a Broadcast Engineer, which amounts to a higher level electronics technician. I know how things work, and why, down to the component level, and to the atomic level on some of them (transistors, etc). I can and have built circuits on proto-board (perfboard/stripboard/whatever), from the idea, through the schematic, and up, successfully.

I recently came up with a project which runs two fans equipped with RGB LEDs to make them look like jet turbines, starting at blue and “heating up” to red and orange, glowing and flickering. I also want to add some sound effects and buttons into the mix. I know how I could achieve the LED portion using a string of 555s, some decade counters, and some other analog components, but in order to do that I would have to create a very complicated schematic, breadboard it, then go through the rest of the process to get it built. In the end, the board itself would be far too big to fit into the enclosure I am planning to use. So I come across the idea to use a uC. I hate jumping on the bandwagon, so I decide right away that I want to go straight to the bare uC, but I have no clue which one to choose. I always read comments about “overkill” and “coulda/shoulda”, so I pose the question at the bottom of the first uC tutorial here on HaD about how to choose the right one. No one responds. In hind-sight it should have gone to the forum, but there are more trolls on the forum than those in the comments. Besides, I figured someone would have subscribed to the comments and been able to answer my question; it is a relevant question after all.

So I disregard the overkill, since I plan on adding features later anyway, and start looking around. I come across the AVR starter packs from EMS and buy one of those. Now I have four Atmega 328p, and four Atinny2313. And the starter boards. And some components to get started. And the USBtiny programmer. I also have a huge parts bin. I put the programmer together (from the kit), and start on the first tutorial here on HaD, from Mike. I get it to work. I feel like a frickin’ champ! But I don’t really know what I just did. I just soldered lots of stuff, which I already knew how to do, and copied some code, which teaches me nothing. Reading through the tutorial, part III, over and over again, I see that maybe if I change the number of cycles on which the interrupt is triggered, I can change the frequency of the blinking. Nope. Didn’t work. Why not? Mike says he got his information from the datasheet. I go to the Atmel website and download everything I can find which I think may help. How to use timers. How to do PWM. The 500+ page datasheet, and I start reading. I read through the “How to use timers” PDF and it is basically telling me exactly what Mike said. PWM doesn’t apply to this situation because I just want to blink it, not dim it. That’s a whole mess of code in the wrong direction. I alter the code a few times, erase the chip, load my new code and still it blinks at 1Hz. WTF? I have been working on this SINGLE PIECE of PROGRAMMING for 4 days. There is no way it should be so difficult to change the blink frequency of an LED.

Then I hear about all the success people have been having with the Arduino; blinking LEDs in minutes out of the box. Kids in high school doing PWM and touch sensors and temp sensors without knowing how to code in C? Well that sounds exactly like what I need. I don’t know how to program at all. I started learning PERL before I tried uCs, but it was a step in the wrong direction, because I am a hardware guy. Maybe if I buy an Arduino, which I have read uses the Atmega 328p anyway, I can sort of adapt the code to my project outside of the pre-fab board. But I doubt it works that way. And even if it does, I am now out of the $ that it cost me to buy the AVR pack and the USBtiny, because neither of them are needed for the Arduino. So I just wasted my money on a pack of AVRs that I still can’t use.

People like me read comments like “GIMF”, “RTFM”, “Just read the datasheet” and so many other things and there I go. I read the info; it is basically a foreign language without the right foundation. And even if I knew how to read it properly, and could somehow decipher how to piece the example code in the PDF together, I still wouldn’t be able to “debug” (if that’s the word for troubleshooting code) the C, because I have no clue what it means. So now I have to learn C first, then learn how to read the datasheet, then learn how to piece the two together.

“There are examples and forums” you say? I am a member of AVR Freaks. I have been reading through the articles there, but as a senior member of many forums, I know that you get the most flaming for asking the same question as the guy before you. I’d rather avoid that. So I am stuck wading through outdated posts which sort-of pertain to what I want to do. By the time I get to the point where I have enough knowledge to actually program the uC, I have completely lost interest in the project. So again, it sounds like the Arduino is perfect for this. And you would probably say that using the Arduino is going to take the same physical space as building the analog circuit, and you may be right, but at least I would have expandability.

I’m pretty much at a loss for what to do from here. I am only a few steps away from giving up the fight with the learning curve and abandoning the uC initiative altogether, and just sticking to what I already know; hardware.

Those of you on the pedestals, what would you recommend I do now?

Ok, this site doesn’t let you look up profiles or anything like that. You can send the code to arduino@deyb.com.

Ease of use has always trumped efficiency. Those who promote the use of microcontroller chips over platforms like Arduino forgot that many years ago hackers bragged about building their digital circuits one flip flop and one transistor at a time. I remember back in college when microcomputers were introduced for the first time into the Computer Science major. The upperclassmen mocked the PC and warned of a dire future of unemployment for those of us who cut their teeth on microcomputers. They insisted mainframes were for real computer scientists. The more things change.