{"id":2108,"date":"2018-08-09T18:45:46","date_gmt":"2018-08-09T22:45:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/?p=2108"},"modified":"2018-08-09T09:18:03","modified_gmt":"2018-08-09T13:18:03","slug":"looking-at-controller-options-for-hardware-sandbox-projects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/2018\/08\/09\/looking-at-controller-options-for-hardware-sandbox-projects\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking at controller options for hardware sandbox projects"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve had several small boards with physical pin access sitting around at home for some time. I’m now looking more closely at what I’ve got and where I can go to start some hardware based work.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> I have Raspberry PI<\/a> boards<\/a> (a couple RPi 3 B+<\/a> and a couple of RPi 2 B<\/a>). I also have a couple of Arduino<\/a> AVR controller<\/a> based boards hanging somewhere.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Looking out at the general market for these things, the RPi<\/a>, Arduino<\/a> and BeagleBoard<\/a> seem to be the readily available options (and pretty affordable for toy projects and prototypes).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Arduino line gets the closest to the metal and is more self-contained (no sd cards, all on chip flash) than the ARM based options (RPi and BeagleBoard). The ARM chips are more capable.<\/p>\n

The prices split out rather strangely as RPi zero boards<\/a> come in around $5.00 in unit quantities while the lower end Arduno boards (the mini<\/a> seems most interesting) with prices at ten pieces<\/a> of under $4.00 each for clone boards. This leaves the powerful ARM based boards at nearly the same price point as the much simpler AVR boards (at least for the bare board).<\/p>\n

I expect that ARM based controllers will be programmed in C or C++ using provided libraries\/drivers for access to the lower level functions. For the AVR controllers, I’m looking at either C or assembler language as their local resources are extremely limited by modern standards.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Arduino cards seem to contain ATmega328P<\/a>, ATmega2560<\/a> and ATmega32U4<\/a> controllers (and older ones with ATmega168s<\/a>. All have the same instruction set<\/a> but different sets of I\/O pins and on-chip peripherals. The 328 parts seem to be the most common (and are available in 28 pin DIP packages making them suitable for very compact and low cost final implementations.<\/p>\n

I’ve grabbed the data sheets and instruction set reference. Over the next few weeks I’ll take a closer look at development tools and likely begin playing with a few things. It has been a while since I’ve gotten my hands dirty this close to the metal…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve had several small boards with physical pin access sitting around at home for some time. I’m now looking more closely at what I’ve got and where I can go to start some hardware based work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-projects","category-sandbox"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7F2Qc-y0","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2108"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2108"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2116,"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2108\/revisions\/2116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninecrows.com\/career\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}