I think the G120 and/or G120HDR boards are so much better. Much faster, a ton more memory, full tcp stack and you get to program in a high level language: C#. This also means that there are a ton of libraries, should you need any. And the price is the same.

https://www.ghielectronics.com/catalog/product/373 https://www.ghielectronics.com/catalog/product/388

...but can you then rebuild the board on your own PCB so that each project doesn't use up the expense of a whole G120?

Yes, but there are some annoying licensing issues, especially with GHI's proprietary libraries (for microchips wifi module, for example).

12-bit ADCs! Woohoo!

If they ever reach 16-bits (or beyond!), our lab may buy them weekly. The 10-bit resolution of the Arduino ADC is the biggest single thing that's kept us from switching to them for general-purpose DAQ.

The speed with which Physics undergrads can pick up the Arduino environment trumps anything else we use. Yes, we can implement I2C/SPI communication to another ADC chip, but the development environment isn't nearly as stable (chips and vendor-specific serial protocols change). The knowledge that the Arduino codebase should remain moderately stable over time makes it worth our trouble to develop for it.

Thank you, Arduino-folk!

The PSoC chip in the freeSoC board (http://freesoc.net/) can do upto 20-bits but the IDE isn't as simple to use as Arduino's.

Interesting, I tried to read the article and my browser (Chrome V22) went nuts. I don't know what sort of JS wired is pushing these days but from this side of the screen it made their site unusable. Sad really. So I went to the http://arduino.cc site ('official Arduino site') and it has no news about a 32 bit Arduino. Ther is an article on Hackaday though : http://hackaday.com/2012/10/03/finally-an-arm-powered-arduin...

Having recently read about the Sony Nexus fake I find myself even more distrustful of tech journalists.

From the hackaday article it looks like it could be an improvement on the original concept.

The arduino.cc link is: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoDUE

It says the page will be available on Monday, when you can buy it.

Weird. FWIW I'm on 22.0.1229.94 Ubuntu 12.10 (161065) and it rendered fine.

Two DACs. Brilliant!

Looks like a lot of cool stuff on-board..anyone know if the Due will be compatible with older shields?

from the article: The Due will continue to work with all Arduino shields [..] that conform to the official Arduino Revision 3 layout. However, the Due operates at 3.3V whereas AVR-based Arduinos operate at 5V, meaning some third-party shields that don’t follow the R3 specs to the letter may not be compatible [..]

So it does in 2012 what the Parallax Propeller did in 2006. Will the wonders ever cease?

The value in the Arduino is not necessarily in the actual processor, but in the tools, documentation, tutorials and library supplied with the boards. And of course in its large community of users and addons ('shields').

Plus the whole "open source hardware" thing...

It does a hell of a lot more than what the propeller can. The chip they use has on-board ADCs and DACs, which makes it a lot easier to interface with analog signals out of the box. It also has a lot more RAM, DMA access so you don't need to use CPU clocks to pull things in and out of memory, support for pretty much any bus you need -- on-board USB slave and host, SPI, I2C, CAN, etc -- for talking to anything in the world. The Propeller was an interesting chip 6 years ago, but the world's more than caught up and surpassed it, with its only saving grace being that it's a cheap multicore chip, but even then, the XMOS chips are far more interesting there.

Yes and what we could do in an FPGA in 1998...

True, but FPGAs are harder to code for, and more expensive. I work with both platforms and find them about as easy to code on, with the Prop costing a little less but requiring external parts to do ADC/DAC.

FPGAs have gotten pretty cheap nowadays. They also aren't that difficult to program if you know Verilog.

we have made a A3P250 FPGA board, with build-in USB interface, total cost of building the board is less than $50, can do a ton of things MCU can not do. would anyone want it if we commercialize it? http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0117/1482/products/IMG_0305... The design was based on http://skywired.net/blog/projects/a3pn250-fpga-breakout-boar..., added regulator chips, got rid of the power-on-reset chips.

If you're not sure, you could start a Kickstarter. That's what it's for - products which are only viable if a certain number of people put down cash.

How does the actel toolkit compare with the xilinx toolkit?

How does this compare to the Teensy 3.0?