Which Microcontroller Is Best Microcontroller?

November 7, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 99 Comments

Let’s say you’re working on a project, and you need a microcontroller. Which chip do you reach for? Probably the one you’re most familiar with, or at least the one whose programmer is hiding away in a corner of your desk. Choosing a microcontroller is a matter of convenience, but it doesn’t have to be this way. There are dozens of different ARM cores alone, hundreds of 8051 clones, and weirder stuff including the Cypress PSoC and TI’s MSP430. Which one is best? Which microcontroller that costs under a dollar is best? That’s the question [Jay Carlson] tried to answer, and it’s the best microcontroller shootout we’ve ever read.

[Jay] put together a monster of a review of a dozen or so microcontrollers that cost no more than a dollar. Included in this review are, from Atmel: the ATtiny1616, ATmega168PB, and the ATSAMD10. From Cypress, the PSoC 4000S. From Freescale, the KE04 and KL03. Holtek’s HT-66, and the Infineon XMC1100. From Microchip, the PIC16, PIC24, and PIC32. From Nuvoton, the N76, and M051. The NXP LPC811, Renesas RL-78, Sanyo LC87, and Silicon Labs EFM8. ST’s STM32F0 and STM8. STCMicro’s STC8, and finally TI’s MSP430. If you’re keeping score at home, most of these are either ARM or 8051-style cores, but the AVRs and PICs bump up the numbers for ‘proprietary’ core designs.

This review begins the same as all tech reviews, with a sampling of tech specs. Everything is there, including the amount of RAM to the number of PWM channels. [Jay] is going a bit further with this review and checking out the development environments, compilers, dev tools, and even the performance of different cores in three areas: blinking bits, a biquad filter, and a DMX receiver. There’s an incredible amount of work that went into this, and right now, this is the best resource we’ve seen for a throwdown of microcontrollers.

With all this data and the experience of going through a dozen different microcontroller platforms, what’s [Jay]’s takeaway? The STM32F0 is great, the Atmel/Microchip SAM D10 has great performance but you’ll be relying on some third-party libraries. The pure Microchip parts — the PIC16, PIC24, and PIC32 — have infinite product lifetimes, a wide range of packages, and a huge community but use a clunky IDE, and expensive compilers. The Cypress PSoC was just okay, and the PSoC5 or PSoC6 would be better. Surprises from this test include the Renesas RL-78 and its high performance, low cost, and the most power-efficient 5V part in the test.

With all that said, what’s the best microcontroller? That’s a dumb question, because the best microcontroller will always be the best microcontroller for that application. Or whatever you have sitting around in the parts drawer, we were never quite clear on what the answer actually is. That said, this is a new high water mark for microcontroller reviews, and we hope [Jay] will continue his research into microcontrollers that cost more than a dollar.

Review: Aneng LT-001 USB Soldering Iron

August 31, 2017 by Jenny List 38 Comments

When it comes to soldering irons, most of us are likely to be in agreement that there is a level of quality below which we will not descend. To do a decent job requires a decent tool, and when it comes to soldering that means a good quality temperature controlled iron with a decent power level and a quality bit. Anything else just isn’t worth considering.

But what if you look at it from the opposite angle? When it comes to soldering, just how low can you go? In that case probably the ultimate scraping of the soldering barrel comes courtesy of USB soldering irons, taking their juice from a five volt phone charger socket and providing tiny power levels you’d expect to be barely enough to work at all. Surely these are toys, not irons! Continue reading “Review: Aneng LT-001 USB Soldering Iron” →

Monoprice Mini Delta Review

August 21, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 82 Comments

For the last year or so, Monoprice has been teasing their follow-up to the fantastic $200 MP Select Mini. This is the $150 mini delta printer. We got a look at it last January at CES, it was on display at the Bay Area Maker Faire last May. Now there’s one on the Hackaday review desk.

Over the last few years, 3D printing has settled down into what most of us expected way back in 2010. No, not everyone wants, or arguably needs, a 3D printer on their desks. This is a far cry from the hype of a few years ago, leaving us with what we have today. 3D printers are just tools, much like a drill press or a laser cutter.

With that said, there still are some fantastic advances in 3D printing coming down from on high. Prusa will be shipping the 4-color multi-extruder add-on for the i3 Mk 2 shortly, and somehow or another we have infinite build volume printers. Still, there’s space to democratize 3D printing, and an opportunity for someone to release a very cheap, very good printer.

Monoprice was kind enough to send me a review unit of the MP Mini Delta before it officially hit their website. This is one of the first off the production line, alongside the few hundred pre ordered on an Indiegogo campaign earlier this year. Does this printer live up to expectations? It sure does, and that’s not just because it’s a $150 printer.

This would be an excellent printer at three times the price, and evidence enough that 3D printing is changing from a weird hobbyist thing to a proper tool.

Continue reading “Monoprice Mini Delta Review” →

Filaween 2.0 Is Go

August 14, 2017 by Elliot Williams 3 Comments

[Thomas Sanladerer] is at it again: testing all of the 3D-printer filaments that are fit to print (with). And this year, he’s got a new and improved testing methodology — video embedded below. And have a search for “filaween2” to see what he’s reviewed so far. There’s some sexy filaments in there.

We really love the brand-new impact strength test, where a hammer is swung on a pivot (3D printed, natch), breaks through the part under test, and swings back up to a measurable height. The difference in swing height reflects the amount of energy required to break the test piece. Sweet physics.

[Thomas] ran a similar few-month-long series last year, and we’re stoked to see it return with all the improvements. Here’s to watching oddball plastics melt!

Continue reading “Filaween 2.0 Is Go” →

DEF CON Badgelife: The ESP Rules All

July 19, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

Badgelife is the celebration of independent hardware creators, working for months at a time to bring custom electronic badges to conferences around the world. This year at DEF CON, Badgelife is huge. It’s not just because this year was supposed to feature a non-electronic badge, and it’s not because the official badge imploded last month — Badgelife is all about people spending most of the year designing, and manufacturing hardware, culminating in one very special weekend.

[Garrett] owns Hacker Warehouse, a store providing all kinds of neat hacker tools ranging from software-defined radios to lock pick sets to side channel analysis toolkits. This year, [Garrett] decided he wanted to branch out his business and get involved in a little bit of hardware creation. He’s been curious about this for some time and figured a limited edition DEF CON badge made sense. What he wound up with is a beautiful little badge with games, blinkies, graphics, and potential to cause a lot of wireless mischief.

Would you look at that. RF design on an independent badge.

The design of the Hacker Warehouse badge is surprisingly simple compared to the Bender Badges and puzzling crypto badges that are also part of this year’s Badgelife hardware celebration. On board is an ESP8266 with a custom PCB implementation that includes a larger Flash chip. The other side of the board is loaded up with four tact switches in a D-pad arrangement. On top is a 96 x 64 pixel full-color OLED display, and blinkies are provided by fourteen mini WS2812 RGB LEDs. Power is provided by two AA cells and what looks to be a nice fancy switching regulator. This is real hardware, not just a few modules thrown together with a bunch of LEDs.

Oh, what wireless fun

This badge is built around the ESP8266, a very interesting WiFi-enabled microcontroller that has more features than it should. [Garrett] is using the ESP as a WiFi scanner of sorts, allowing anyone with this badge to monitor WiFi channels, APs, packets, and — this is important — deauth packets.

Over the last year, there have been a number of projects around the Internet that take an ESP8266 and spew deauthorization frames into the spectrum. These frames cause a WiFi client to stop using an access point, and basically shuts down all the WiFi in an area. It’s well documented, and people have been doing it for years, but the ESP8266 makes deauth attacks so very, very easy. We’re going to see a lot of deauth frames this year at DEF CON, and the Hacker Warehouse badge will be able to detect them. It can also generate these frames, but that capability is locked for now.

Blinking and glowing

An electronic conference badge isn’t cool unless it has obnoxiously bright and glowy LEDs, and the Hacker Warehouse badge is very cool.

Onboard the Hacker Warehouse badge are 14 RGB LEDs, programmed with 46 different patterns that are certainly bright enough to annoy someone. This is what you need for a badge, and it’s beautiful.

This is a truly fantastic badge that’s also a great development board for the ESP8266. Everything you need for portable WiFi gaming fun is already there — you have blinky LEDs, an OLED, what seems to be a fairly nice power supply, and enough buttons to do something interesting. All you need to do to program this badge is attach a USB to serial adapter to the pre-populated header and you really have something. It’s a great badge, and we can’t wait to see the hacks for this great piece of hardware next week at DEF CON.

The Cheapest Meter On Banggood

July 17, 2017 by Al Williams 61 Comments

According to [pileofstuff], he didn’t really need another digital multimeter. However, when he saw a DT-832 meter on Banggood for the princely sum for $4.99 he wondered just what kind of meter you’d get for that price. You can see his conclusions in his recent video (below). He does make it clear, by the way, that he wasn’t paid for the review or given the meter. He just decided to see what $5 would buy in a meter.

Depending on your predisposition to cheap Asian electronics, you may or may not be surprised. After all, for $5 you can’t expect a top-of-the-line lab instrument. The device measures AC and DC voltage, DC amperage, ohms, transistor beta, and has a diode tester and continuity buzzer. It also has some frequency measurement capability. You can’t be too surprised it doesn’t auto range, though. To be fair, although he mentions Banggood as the source of the meter, a quick Google search shows you can get them from all the usual sources, and the price is down to $3.73 as long as you let them ship it from Canada.

Continue reading “The Cheapest Meter On Banggood” →

Books You Should Read: The Bridge

July 14, 2017 by Adam Fabio 95 Comments

A few weeks ago, Amazon’s crack marketing AI decided to recommend a few books for me. That AI must be getting better because instead of the latest special-edition Twilight books, I was greeted with this:

“The asteroid was called the Hand of God when it hit.”

That’s the first sentence of The Bridge, a new Sci-Fi book by Leonard Petracci. If you think that line sucks you in, wait until you read the whole first chapter.

The Bridge is solidly in the generation ship trope. A voyage hundreds or even thousands of years long, with no sleep or stasis pods. The original crew knows they have no hope of seeing their destination, nor will their children and grandchildren. Heinlein delved into it with Orphans of the Sky. Even Robert Goddard himself discussed generation ships in The Last Migration.

I wouldn’t call The Bridge hard Sci-Fi — and that’s perfectly fine. Leonard isn’t going for scientific accuracy. It’s a great character driven story. If you enjoyed a book like Ready Player One, you’ll probably enjoy this.

The Bridge Is the story of Dandelion 14, a ship carrying people of Earth to a new planet. At some point during the journey, Dandelion 14 was struck by an asteroid, which split the ship in two. Only a few wires and cables keep the halves of the ship together. The crew on both sides of the ship survived, but they had no way to communicate. They do catch glimpses of each other in the windows though.

Much of the story is told in the first person by Horatius, a young man born hundreds of years after the asteroid strike. Horatius’ side of the ship has a population of one thousand, carefully measured at each census. They’ve lost knowledge of how to operate the ship’s systems, but they are surviving. Most of the population are gardeners, but there are doctors, cooks, porters, and a few historians. At four years old, Horatius is selected to become a gardener, like his father was before him. But Horatius has higher aspirations. He longs to become a historian to learn the secrets of the generations that came before him and to write his own story down for those who will come after.

Horatius sees the faces of the people on the other side of the ship as well. Gaunt, hungry, often fighting with knives or other weapons. A stark contrast to the well-fed people on his side of the vessel. The exception is one red-haired girl about his age. He often finds her staring back at him, watching him.

Horatius might have been chosen as a gardener, but he’s clever — a fact that sometimes gets him in trouble. His life takes an abrupt turn when the sleeping ship awakens with an announcement blaring “Systems Rebooting, Ship damage assessed. Reuniting the two halves of the ship and restoring airlock, approximately twenty-four hours until complete.”

The hardest part of writing a book review is not giving too much away. While I won’t tell you much more about the plot for The Bridge, I can tell a bit about how the book came about. You might call this book a hack of the publishing system. Leonard Petracci is also known as leoduhvinci on Reddit. The Bridge started life as Leonard’s response to a post on /r/writingprompts. The prompt went like this:

After almost 1,000 years the population of a generation ship has lost the ability to understand most technology and now lives at a pre-industrial level. Today the ship reaches its destination and the automated systems come back online.

Leonard ’s response to the prompt shot straight to the top, and became the first chapter of The Bridge. Chapter 2 followed soon after. In only a few months, the book was complete. Available on Reddit, and on Leonard’s website. The Bridge is also available on Amazon for Kindle, and on paper from Amazon’s CreateSpace.

The only real criticism I have about The Bridge is the ending. The book’s resolution felt a bit rushed. It would have been nice to have a few more pages telling us what happened to the characters after the major events of the book. Leonard is planning a sequel though, and he teases this in the final pages.

You can start reading The Bridge right now on Leonard’s website. He has the entire book online for free for a few more weeks. If you’ve missed the free period, the Kindle edition is currently $2.99.