Adafruit Arduino Sale

With the release of the Arduino Duemilanove, Adafruit is trying to shift out some old stock Arduino Diecimila by offering 10% off. [amk] noted that the new Duemilanove is not so much an upgrade as an Arduino with a new hat. The only changes were autoselecting power and a cutable reset line. The best part about the Adafruit sale is they’re offering Atmega328s preloaded with the Arduino bootloader as a $5 upgrade. The Atmega328 gives you twice the flash memory, twice the RAM, and twice the EEPROM than the original Atmega168.

19 thoughts on “Adafruit Arduino Sale

  1. Say I wanted to build something that would do interactive lighting, or some other such simple project.

    How would I go about learning the language to use an arduino>? It seems to have potential but i’m a noob and don’t know where to start!

  2. Seems to be in American dollars when I ordered mine. There are other sellers selling the Duemilanove and the Diecimila for the same price or within a few dollars, check http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Buy for a list. Didn’t see the chip upgrade available at any of the others though. Shipping in the us using US postal in the US was dead cheap, only like $3-$4.

  3. @ Fartface, your link shows the same price ($30) for an assembled Arduino.

    Frankly since an “arduino” is basically an Atmega with a power supply, crystal and level shifter, most people comfortable with soldering save their money and just buy the crystal and Atmega in bulk for $3-5 apiece. The “level shifter” can be scavenged from a cellphone data cable and shared across all projects, as it is built into the RS-232 cable end. The power can be determined per project, I like to use 4x NiMH for ~5v, thus making the circuit cheaper and simpler.

    The whole point of the arduino is to shield new users from circuits and pinouts and level shifters and programmers. To some extent this includes shielding them from soldering if they don’t want to, so a kit is not the best choice for some if they are already considering an Arduino over a bare Atmega and Crystal at around $5-7

  4. I have been a fan of hackaday for many years. However for the last year and a half, hackaday has become an arduino fanboi site. This pretty much hits a new low. It is basically an advertisement for the damn chip.

  5. @ Shellster, they don’t really pimp arduino that much (afaik).

    Arduino isn’t a chip, Atmega is a chip. I recommend an Atmega chip, it is pretty easy and cheap, I can flash them with 4 resistors and a parallel port with free tools, not bad.

    The Uzebox is built on an Atmega chip, does this also constitute pimping the arduino “chip” in your mind?

  6. An article about a sale at another website? Really hackaday? really? Couldn’t give us some kind of review of the ATmega328 or something that is actually informative?

    Also; am I the only AVR user who doesn’t do the arduino thing?

  7. I don’t do arduino, lots of fluff for not much content imho (but great for noobs or people not into soldering), the Atmega is the real star of the show, and they run fine off of USB port power, so I don’t use any voltage regulators either.

  8. I appreciate the notice about cheap Arduinos. This is not the same as some of the shameless ads that crop up from time to time. The Arduino has taken over hobbyist electronics sites for good reason. For those of you that are *so* hardcore, you don’t need hackaday anyway.

  9. @sol

    It’s not that we are “*so* hardcore” it’s that we would rather program something ourselves and many of us have built programmers for AVR/PICs to do just that.

    While the arduino is a great beginner platform, it it does not reflect ‘hacking’ as much as developing.

    ie homebrew on a nintendo DS vs the game pack developed on arduino. just my $0.02

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