Contrarian view: these days I don't care how much a microcontroller costs. In quantities I'm designing for, it doesn't matter, and the cost is dwarfed by the cost of my time writing the software.<p>I've spent a lot of time dealing with crappy and broken vendor libraries, erratas, SDKs and toolkits where the vendor changes their entire strategy every year or so, and I'm tired. At this point I wrote (I thnk) three I2C libraries for various devices and systems (they're on github) — I should never have to do that!<p>These days I mostly use Nordic chips — not only does almost every device I design need BLE these days, but the chips are fairly nice, the SDK is developed, maintained and supported, and there is a refreshing feeling of sanity. Sure, a BMD-300 or BMD-350 module with an nRF52832 will be $10 instead of $1 or $2, but I will save so much time and frustration, that it's definitely worth it!<p>A vendor starting to officially support Rust might change my perspective, but to this day I haven't seen any other vendor take software as seriously as Nordic does.
I have such a soft spot for PICs, specifically the 16F84<p>20 odd years ago when I didn't know any better and work was boring I built a universal remote control - and put it in a PSX controller case. This was all coded in assembler which I still have, programmed with a DIY adapter that ran off a parallel port. So much fun. I used this for a few years.<p>Outside: <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/0w9c61e3mfdc3lw/Photo%20Oct%2026%2C%2008%2023%2058.jpg?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/s/0w9c61e3mfdc3lw/Photo%20Oct%2026%2...</a><p>Inside (I have no shame): <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/jep4rzz377h1svo/Photo%20Oct%2026%2C%2008%2028%2024.jpg?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/s/jep4rzz377h1svo/Photo%20Oct%2026%2...</a><p>Video: <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/45q3uk6cgw9ti46/Video%20Oct%2026%2C%2008%2039%2010.mov?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/s/45q3uk6cgw9ti46/Video%20Oct%2026%2...</a><p>The video was made earlier in the year, I was curious if it still worked.... not so shabby.<p>Version 2 had a touch screen. That's still lying around somewhere.
Last year's discussion of this article[1] is the 7th most favorited Hacker News submission ever[2].<p>1: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19851744" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19851744</a>
2: <a href="https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/hacker-favourites-analysis" rel="nofollow">https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/hacker-favourites-an...</a>
$1. Ouch. Too rich for me. I use $0.03 MCUs!
<a href="https://hackaday.com/2019/09/09/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-padauk-mcus-and-more/" rel="nofollow">https://hackaday.com/2019/09/09/everything-you-wanted-to-kno...</a>
It is truly amazing what you can get these days.<p>If the author had compared an Cortex M0+ part [1] there are lots available for < $1.<p>For me, the ability to use command line gcc and editor on Linux to program and debug these things is the real win. I know the new kids all want a fancy IDE but I get from starting vim on a blank screen to running blink in about the same amount of time it takes eclipse to start up.<p>Back in the day (2002) I like the PIC16F628 and even designed a board for it[2] but pretty much now I can't stand to program them.<p>[1] From 2012 -- <a href="https://www.electronicproducts.com/a-look-at-cortex-m0-and-m0-microcontrollers/#" rel="nofollow">https://www.electronicproducts.com/a-look-at-cortex-m0-and-m...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/robotics/projects/wsm.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/robotics/projects/wsm.html</a>
Free PCB for that project to anyone who has postage ($1) :-) contact in my profile.
What I want to know about a microcontroller is, (a) can I use Make/Gcc/Gdb to develop for it without a lot of guesswork, and (b) what is its interrupt latency? The article only hinted at (b) for a couple of them, and said practically nothing about (a). IDEs are a trap.
As the article itself is undated, it's hard to tell how old this info is.<p>Looking at some of the follow up comments at the bottom of the article, they're from 2017 onwards.<p>So, the article itself may be becoming dated at this point.
Seems like he didn't mention ESP8266 or anything like that. At that time it wasn't $1, but I do see some around that price on Aliexpress now.
Dumb question, but how do you learn to work/program for these things? any reading material I can look at? I started learning C this week and this looks very interesting.
I think the IDE's are highly overrated. Some may provide good product specific documentation, autocomplete, flashing and debugging. But most of the times they are highly opinionated programs with their own quirks and annoyances you need to work around to get your code running on a chip. I would be sad to have to turn down a good chip because it has a bad IDE.<p>I much more prefer good support for opensource framework's like platformio[0]. This way it hardly matters which specific chip I'm using, my workflow is mostly the same. And I can use the same editor, tools and methods I already use for developing all my other code without having to learn the quirks of new tools.<p>[0] <a href="https://platformio.org/boards" rel="nofollow">https://platformio.org/boards</a>
It frustrates me that the AVR architecture is so good and yet so poorly speced, I would really like to see something that had the RAM size and Clock speed of some 32 bit controllers. Sometimes when you want to just throw some bytes around, 8-bit is best.<p>It would have been fun if Logic Green had made a high end variant of the lgt8f328 were they stuffed it full of RAM (like 48k) It has more one clock instructions than the ATMega and 32MHz from an internal osc.
This article is great, but misses the mark by focusing on this arbitrary $1 price point. For a hobbyist, a dollar or ten is all the same. These very cheap chips are intended for high volume applications, far from the realm of DIY.<p>If you’re doing a hobby project, take something off the top of the line. Having all those peripherals and compute power is just one thing less to worry about.
Edit: I forgot about inexpensive arduino nano boards. I'll leave my original incorrect comment below though.<p>Is this supposed to be geared towards hobbyist? If so, the $1 cost is sort of irrelevant if you have to spend $20 to $100 on programmers, development board, etc., when you can get a Pi Zero for & micro sd card for about $10 and be up & coding in an hour.