ARMing a Breadboard – Everyone Should Program an ARM

Re:ARMing a Breadboard – Everyone Should Program an ARM by klagermkii on Saturday October 10, 2015 @11:46AM (#10365863)

Most hobby electronics projects aren't really CPU limited though, so using ARM doesn't really bring relevant advantages. Having a standard platform, including the peripherals like PWM/ADC/timer etc which are going to vary wildly between ARM implementations, is far more important for people starting out and are trying to solve their problems via Google.

The 5V chips are also better at taking punches from miswired projects.

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Re:ARMing a Breadboard – Everyone Should Program an ARM by ChuckMcM on Saturday October 10, 2015 @12:39PM (#10366017)

My experience is that most hobby projects are RAM limited when people are using the AVR chips. Whether its trying to hold a copy of an LCD view, or any sort of moderate data structure. The ATMega328 is 8K of RAM. The M0+ chips seems to all come with 64K of RAM, and given that folks are writing in C/C++ rather than Assembler that is quite helpful.

I agree with you on the general tolerances to abuse though. I've filled out a couple of surveys sent to me by semiconductor folks (I often get one after attending a free training session) and I've mentioned several times that a short/overvoltage hardened chip would be a useful thing for me. You can do that with off chip parts but since manufacturers are wondering what to do with an abundance of silicon surface area to distinguish their products, I continue to suggest that would be one way.

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Re:ARMing a Breadboard – Everyone Should Program an ARM by aexaey on Saturday October 10, 2015 @12:48PM (#10366063)

> The ATMega328 is 8K of RAM

No, just 2K. [0]

> The M0+ chips seems to all come with 64K of RAM

That would be 8K. [1]

[0] http://www.atmel.com/devices/atmega328.aspx

[1] http://www.st.com/web/en/catalog/mmc/FM141/SC1169/SS1817?sc=...

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Re:ARMing a Breadboard – Everyone Should Program an ARM by ChuckMcM on Sunday October 11, 2015 @01:17AM (#10368165)

Thanks, I was talking to the Atmel Tech On Tour folks today and the part I'm really interested in of late is the R21 which has both radio parts and the M0+ in a tiny package.

It has up to 32K of RAM and 256K of flash [2], the larger Cortex chips have the big RAM numbers as you note.

[1] http://design.avnet.com/axiom/atmel-sam-r21-atmel-cortex-m0-...

[2] http://www.atmel.com/Images/Atmel-42223-SAM-R21_Datasheet.pd...

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Re:ARMing a Breadboard – Everyone Should Program an ARM by CamperBob2 on Saturday October 10, 2015 @11:40PM (#10367943)

I agree with this take on it. I either find myself using an Arduino or other cheesy AVR board, or a "serious" FPGA platform. There never seems to be much demand around here for mid-grade controllers or SoCs. If I can't get the job done with an Atmega256, I'll drag out the heavy artillery.

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