Arduíno Mega e os novos arduíno ARM. Qual o melhor investimento?

Estava a pensar comprar um arduino uno e um arduino mega, Entretanto soube de novo hardware da arduíno (com arquitetura ARM) que vai sair e fiquei indeciso, dado que parece ter mais capacidades de memória e rapidez. O que vos parece? Sei que o UNO tem muitos utilizadores e muitos projetos, talvez não seja mau para um principiante. Será um desperdício comprar o mega?


Os Atmel de todas as Arduinos são processadores ARM.
Os diversos modelos diferenciam-se pela memória e velocidade, pelo nº de portas e alguma especificidade que evitará aquisição de shields e outros modulos.

O Arduino Mega permitirá projectos mais complexos quer ao nivel do hardware quer do software.

Penso que é de começar com um Uno e depois face às necessidades, evoluir para Mega ou Duo.

About Ardunio

About Ardunio:

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

Arduino hardware is programmed using a Wiring-based language (syntax + libraries), similar to C++ with some simplifications and modifications, and a Processing-based IDE

The boards can be built by hand or purchased preassembled.

The Arduino Uno (used in my projects) is a microcontroller board based on the ATmega328 (datasheet). It has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. It contains everything needed to support the microcontroller; simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable or power it with a AC-to-DC adapter or battery to get started.

Each of the 14 digital pins on the Uno can be used as an input or output, using pinMode(), digitalWrite(), and digitalRead() functions. They operate at 5 volts. Each pin can provide or receive a maximum of 40 mA and has an internal pull-up resistor (disconnected by default) of 20-50 kOhms. In addition, some pins have specialized functions.

Summary

Microcontroller:	ATmega328
Operating Voltage:	5V
Input Voltage (recommended):	7-12V
Input Voltage (limits):	6-20V
Digital I/O Pins:	14 (of which 6 provide PWM output)
Analog Input Pins:	6
DC Current per I/O Pin:	40 mA
DC Current for 3.3V Pin:	50 mA
Flash Memory:	32 KB (ATmega328) of which 0.5 KB used by bootloader
SRAM:	2 KB (ATmega328)
EEPROM:	1 KB (ATmega328)
Clock Speed:	16 MHz

Arduino DUE - an official Arduino with ARM

Arduino » Arduino Due

wired.com

Arduino obviously helps achieving lots of tasks with minimal knowledge, and hardware needs. Its all there – IDE, compiler, programmer and board. Tons of libraries and shields makes this thing hold strong positions among other platforms. Anyway there are lots of claims that AVR based Arduino many times reaches its limits when speaking of performance, memory and features. When Arduino DUE appeared things is gonna change – at least in some areas. Still same useless IDE and most of libraries but it’s gonna beat this with much higher performance and RAM.

The long-awaited Arduino Due just hit the market, replacing the 8-bit, 16MHz brain of the popular Uno microcontroller prototyping platform with a 32-bit, 84MHz processor, while augmenting inputs and capabilities all around (Figure 1).

Figure 1.	The Arduino Due and its Atmel SAM3X8E means your DIY 3-D printer can produce finer resolution, along with other improvements.

For robotics and electronics hobbyists, its a moment of much excitement. But for the rest of us, what does this new controller offer over the older models?

“Having a 32bit ARM processor running at 84 MHz allows you to do much more much quicker,” explains Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi in an e-mail to Wired. “If you think about the Quadcopters that Chris Anderson and his community are building (Figure 2), they need to read many sensors as fast as possible then process all that data to calculate how to keep the quadcopter flying properly. Having a faster processor, with much more capabilities like DMA can increase the stability, responsiveness and precision of the aircraft while using less chips to do it.”

Figure 2.	Arduino Due controls this quadcopter.

The heart of the Arduino Due is the Atmel SAM3X8E, an ARM Cortex-M3-based processor. And the board builds off the capabilities of this summer’s Arduino Leonardo release, offering two micro USB ports – one for programming and communications and one that allows the Due to act as a client or host, allowing it to act as or utilize a USB mouse or keyboard. This addition gives Banzi excitement. “The USB host is something people have requested a lot over the years and it’s one of the places where we’re going to see the craziest applications being developed by the community.”

Thanks to its new Atmel chip, the Arduino Due takes a giant leap forward in terms of ADC performance, allowing designers to push the limits of their creations. “Many people have built cool open source scientific instruments using Arduino in the past, with the Due they get 12-bit analog inputs, 12-bit analog outputs,” Massimo explains. The theoretical sampling rate has been multiplied to a whopping 1,000 ksps (kilosamples per second). In comparison, the Arduino Uno, Leonardo, and Mega 2560 boards all have theoretical ADC speeds of 15 ksps.

The Due is also the first Arduino to feature a built-in digital-to-analog converter – two, in fact. An audio library for the Due is also being released, coupling onto the Due’s ability for wav file playback. Meanwhile, rumors about a Google-written ogg player code that can also be used.

The Arduino team also worked with Google’s Android Developer Kit team on the ADK 2012 platform, who used a version of the Due’s layout for their board. But despite the general popularity Android, Banzi sees room for much growth in the ADK community.

“Unfortunately we have seen very few applications done by the community.” he says. “I think Google should promote it more and work with the community to make the right tutorials, the right documentation that would make people embrace it. If you think about it, Apple has a similar technology that is proprietary, closed source, covered by NDA and requires a special chip and yet you see many hardware accessories developed for the iPhone/iPad. Android has a good technology released as open source and yet it gets less traction.”

Meanwhile, the Due continues to support the ADK 2.0 protocol, making it compatible with Google’s libraries and certain code written for the ADK.

The Due will continue to work with all Arduino shields – add-on boards and circuitry like motion sensors and LED light arrays – 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, depending on their voltages. It also means those looking to use the Due in existing applications should adjust their voltage or risk damaging their board.

The Arduino team has also assured that changes to the IDE will allow for cross-platform compatibility. Sketches that you write for your Uno or other AVR-based boards can run on a Due. There will of course be under-the-hood differences in how the software compiles your programs, but the design is intended to make the user experience seamless.

Despite its increase in power and features, beginners and less advanced users will probably want to stick with the classic Uno for now. “The basic Arduinos like the UNO or Leonardo are still the best to learn with.” says Banzi “They are super simple, very stable and come with tons of examples and libraries.”

As for the delay in the release of the Due, Banzi credits it to growing pains. “In the last two years, we had to move from a loose group of people working on the project to a proper company with properemployees to take care of all of the different business functions,” He explains. “Now there are doors around the world with Arduino (or Officine Arduino) written on it, with teams doing good work. Growing up sometimes slows things down.”

The Due was introduced in October 2012, and is priced at $49.

Technical Specification

• Microcontroller: AT91SAM3X8E
• Operating Voltage: 3.3V
• Input Voltage (recommended): 7-12V
• Input Voltage (min/max): 6-20V
• Digital I/O Pins: 54 (of which 6 provide PWM)
• Analog Input Pins: 12
• Analog Output Pins: 2 (DAC)
• Total DC Output Current on all I/O lines: 130 mA
• DC Current for 3.3V Pin: 800 mA
• DC Current for 5V Pin: theoretical 1A, recommended 800 mA
• Flash Memory: 512 KB
• SRAM: 96 KB (64 + 32 KB)
• Clock speed: 84 MHz
• Debug access: JTAG/SWD connector

The Making of Arduino

Arduino

How five friends engineered a small circuit board that’s taking the DIY world by storm

The picturesque town of Ivrea, which straddles the blue-green Dora Baltea River in northern Italy, is famous for its underdog kings. In 1002, King Arduin became the ruler of the country, only to be dethroned by King Henry II, of Germany, two years later. Today, the Bar di Re Arduino, a pub on a cobblestoned street in town, honors his memory, and that’s where an unlikely new king was born.

The bar is the watering hole of Massimo Banzi, the Italian cofounder of the electronics project that he named Arduino in honor of the place. Arduino is a low-cost microcontroller board that lets even a novice do really amazing things. You can connect an Arduino to all kinds of sensors, lights, motors, and other devices and use easy-to-learn software to program how your creation will behave. You can build an interactive display or a mobile robot and then share your design with the world by posting it on the Net.

The Arduino core team [from left]—David Cuartielles, Gianluca Martino, Tom Igoe, David Mellis, and Massimo Banzi—get together at Maker Faire in New York City.(Photo: Randi Silberman Klett)

Released in 2005 as a modest tool for Banzi’s students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII), Arduino has spawned an international do-it-yourself revolution in electronics. You can buy an Arduino board for just about US $30 or build your own from scratch: All hardware schematics and source code are available for free under public licenses. As a result, Arduino has become the most influential open-source hardware movement of its time.

The little board is now the go-to gear for artists, hobbyists, students, and anyone with a gadgetry dream. More than 250 000 Arduino boards have been sold around the world—and that doesn’t include the reams of clones. "It made it possible for people do things they wouldn’t have done otherwise," says David A. Mellis, who was a student at IDII before pursuing graduate work at the MIT Media Lab and is the lead software developer of Arduino.

The team recently unveiled the Arduino Due, a board with a 32-bit Cortex-M3 ARM processor that offers more computing power for makers with complex projects (Photo: Randi Silberman Klett)

There are Arduino-based breathalyzers, LED cubes, home-automation systems, Twitter displays, and even DNA analysis kits. There are Arduino parties and Arduino clubs. Google has recently released an Arduino-based development kit for its Android smartphone. As Dale Dougherty, the editor and publisher of Make magazine, the bible of DIY builders, puts it, Arduino has become "the brains of maker projects."

But Arduino isn’t just an open-source project that aims to make technology more accessible. It’s also a start-up company run by Banzi and a group of friends, and it’s facing a challenge that even their magic board can’t solve: how to survive success and grow. "We need to make the next jump," Banzi tells me, "and become an established company."

Arduino rose out of another formidable challenge: how to teach students to create electronics, fast. It was 2002, and Banzi, a bearded and avuncular software architect, had been brought on by IDII as an associate professor to promote new ways of doing interactive design—a nascent field sometimes known as physical computing. But with a shrinking budget and limited class time, his options for tools were few.

Like many of his colleagues, Banzi relied on the BASIC Stamp, a microcontroller created by California company Parallax that engineers had been using for about a decade. Coded with the BASIC programming language, the Stamp was like a tidy little circuit board, packing the essentials of a power supply, a microcontroller, memory, and input/output ports for attaching hardware. But the BASIC Stamp had two problems, Banzi discovered: It didn’t have enough computing power for some of the projects his students had in mind, and it was also a bit too expensive—a board plus basic parts could cost about US $100. He also needed something that could run on Macintosh computers, which were ubiquitous among the IDII designers. What if they could make a board that suited their needs themselves?

Banzi had a colleague from MIT who had developed a designer-friendly programming language called Processing. Processing was rapidly gaining popularity because it allowed even inexperienced programmers to create complex—and beautiful—data visualizations. One of the reasons for its success was an extremely easy-to-use integrated development environment, or IDE. Banzi wondered if they could create similar software tools to code a microcontroller instead of graphics on a screen.

A student in the program, Hernando Barragán, took the first steps in that direction. He developed a prototyping platform called Wiring, which included both a user-friendly IDE and a ready-to-use circuit board. It was a promising project that continues to this day, but Banzi was already thinking bigger: He wanted to make a platform that was even simpler, cheaper, and easier to use.

The first prototype board, made in 2005, was a simple design, and it wasn’t called Arduino. Massimo Banzi would coin the name later that year (Photo: Massimo Banzi)

Banzi and his collaborators were strong believers in open-source software. Since the purpose was to create a quick and easily accessible platform, they felt they’d be better off opening up the project to as many people as possible rather than keeping it closed. Another factor that contributed to that decision was that after operating for five years, IDII was running out of funds and was going to close its doors. Faculty members feared their projects would not survive or would be misappropriated. "So we said, ‘Forget it,’ " Banzi recalls. " ‘Let’s make it open source.’ "

The open-source model had long been used to fuel innovation for software, but not hardware. To make it work, they had to find an appropriate licensing solution that could apply to their board. After some investigation, they realized that if they simply looked at their project differently, they could use a license from Creative Commons, the nonprofit group whose agreements are normally used for cultural works such as music and writing. "You could think of hardware as piece of culture you want to share with other people," Banzi says.

To make the board, the group had a specific, student-friendly price as their goal: $30. "It had to be the equivalent of going out to dinner at a pizza place," Banzi says. They also wanted to make it quirky, something that would stand out and be cool-looking to erudite geeks. If other boards were often green, they’d make theirs blue; while some manufacturers economized on input and output pins, they’d add plenty to their board. As a final touch, they added a little map of Italy on the back of the board. "A lot of the design choices are weird for a real engineer," Banzi says with a knowing laugh, "but I’m not a real engineer, so I did it in a silly way!"

For one of the "real" engineers on the team, Gianluca Martino, the unconventional, meatball-surgery approach to circuit board design was enlightening. Martino describes it as a "new way of thinking about electronics," he says, "not in an engineering way, where you have to count electrodes, but a do-it-yourself approach."

The product the team created consisted of cheap parts that could easily be found if users wanted to build their own boards, such as the ATmega328 microcontroller. But a key decision was to ensure that it would be, essentially, plug-and-play: something someone could take out of a box, plug into a computer, and use immediately. Boards such as the BASIC Stamp required that DIYers shell out for half a dozen other items that added to the total cost. But for theirs, a user could just pull out a USB cable from the board and connect it to a computer—Mac or PC—to program the device.

"The philosophy behind Arduino is that if you want to learn electronics, you should be able to learn as you go from day one, instead of starting by learning algebra," says another member of the team, telecommunications engineer David Cuartielles.

The team would soon put that philosophy to the test. They handed 300 blank printed circuit boards to the IDII students with a simple directive: Look up the assembly instructions online, build your own board, and use it for something. One of the first projects was a homemade alarm clock that hung from the ceiling by a cable. Whenever you hit the snooze button, the clock would rise tauntingly higher into the air until you just had to get up.

Soon other people heard about the boards. And they wanted one. The first customer was a friend of Banzi’s, who ordered one unit. The project was starting to take off, but one major thing was missing—a name for their invention. One night over drinks at the local pub, it came to them: Arduino, just like the bar—and the king.

Word of Arduino quickly spread online, with no marketing or advertising. Early on, it attracted the attention of Tom Igoe, a professor of physical computing at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and today a member of the core Arduino team. Igoe had been teaching courses to nontechnical students using the BASIC Stamp but was impressed by Arduino’s features. "They had the assumption that you didn’t know electronics and programming, that you didn’t want to configure an entire machine just so you could program a chip—you could just open up the board, press upload, and it works," he says. "I was also impressed with the goal of a $30 price, which made it accessible. This was one of the key factors for me."

In that regard, the success of Arduino owes a lot to the prior existence of Processing and Wiring. Those projects gave Arduino one of its essential strengths: the user-friendly programming environment. Before Arduino, coding a microcontroller brought with it a difficult learning curve. With Arduino, even those with no previous electronics experience gained access to a previously impenetrable hardware world. Now, beginners don’t have to learn much before they can build a prototype that actually works. It’s a powerful movement at a time when some of the most popular gadgets out there work as "black boxes" that are closed and patent protected.

For Banzi, this is perhaps the most important impact of Arduino: the democratization of engineering. "Fifty years ago, to write software you needed people in white aprons who knew everything about vacuum tubes. Now, even my mom can program," Banzi says. "We’ve enabled a lot of people to create products themselves."

Not all engineers love Arduino. The more persnickety ones bemoan the product for dumbing down product creation and flooding the hobbyist market with lackluster goods. Mellis, however, doesn’t see the innovation as devaluing the role of the engineer at all. "By providing a platform that lets the artist or designer get a little way in there, it makes it easier for them to work with engineers and say, ’This is what I want to do,’ " he says. "I don’t think it’s replacing the engineer; it’s just facilitating that collaboration."

To fuel greater adoption of Arduino, the team is exploring how to integrate it more deeply into the education system, from grade schools to colleges. Several universities, including Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, already use Arduino. Mellis has been studying how students and laypeople take to electronics in a series of workshops at the MIT Media Lab. Mellis invites 8 to 10 people to the lab, where they’re given a task to complete over the course of a day. The projects have included building iPod speakers, FM radios, and a computer mouse using some of the same components that Arduino uses.

But spreading the Arduino gospel is only part of the challenge. The team must also keep up with demand for the boards. In fact, the Arduino platform doesn’t consist of one type of board anymore—there’s now an entire family of boards. In addition to the original design, called the Arduino Uno, the new models include a more powerful board called the Arduino Mega, a compact board called the Arduino Nano, a waterproof board called the LilyPad Arduino, and a recently released, Net-enabled board called the Arduino Ethernet.

Arduino has also created its own cottage industry for DIY electronics. There are more than 200 distributors of Arduino products around the world, from large companies such as SparkFun Electronics, in Boulder, Colo., to mom-and-pop operations serving local needs. Banzi recently heard from a man in Portugal who quit his job at the phone company to sell Arduino products from his home. Arduino team member Gianluca Martino, who oversees production and distribution, says they’re working overtime to reach emerging markets such as China, India, and South America. At this point, he says, about 80 percent of the Arduino audience is split between the United States and Europe, with the rest scattered around the world.

Because the team can’t afford to stock hundreds of thousands of boards, they instead produce anywhere from 100 to 3000 per day at a manufacturing facility near Ivrea. The team created a custom system for testing the pins on each board, which for the Uno includes 14 digital I/O pins, 6 analog input pins, and another 6 pins for the power supply—a big quality-assurance challenge when you’re handling thousands of units a day. The Arduino board is inexpensive enough for the team to promise to replace any board that doesn’t work. Martino says the failure rate is below 1 percent.

The Arduino team contracted with a company that can manufacture from 100 to 3000 boards per day at a facility near Ivrea, Italy (Photo: Massimo Banzi)

The Arduino team is now earning enough to support two of its members as full-time employees and is making plans to bring even more circuit board power to the people. In September, at the Maker Faire, a convention in New York City sponsored by Make magazine, the team launched its first board with a 32-bit processor—an ARM chip—up from the 8-bit one of the past. This will serve the demand for powering more robust peripherals. The MakerBot Thing-O-Matic, for example, is a 3-D printer kit built on Arduino, but it would benefit from a faster processor to achieve more complicated tasks.

Arduino got another boost this year when Google released an Arduino-based developer board for its Android system. Google’s Android ADK, or Accessory Development Kit, is a platform that lets an Android phone interact with motors, sensors, and other devices. You can build an Android app that uses the phone’s camera, motion sensors, touch screen, and Internet connectivity to control a display or robot, for example. Enthusiasts say that the added Android capability opens up the possibilities for Arduino projects even more.

The team is cautious, however, about overcomplicating Arduino. "The challenge is finding a way to accommodate all the different things that people want to do with the platform," Mellis says, "without making it too complex for someone just getting started."

In the meantime, they’re enjoying their unlikely fame. Fans travel from far away just to have a drink at the pub in Ivrea where the phenomenon got its name. "People go to the bar and say, ’We’re here because of the Arduino board,’ " Banzi says. There’s just one problem, he adds with a laugh: The bartenders don’t know what the Arduino board is.

spectrum.ieee.org

David Kushner

Arduino Zero

Hinted at yesterday by Massimo Banzi during his keynote speech at MakerCon yesterday, Arduino has just officially announced their latest board—the Arduino Zero.

On the surface the board may look very similar to the Arduino Leonardo, but there are big differences. Powered by a 32-bit ARM Cortex M0+ core, the Atmel SAMD21, the new board is significantly faster than the traditional 8-bit Arduino boards, running at 48MHz, and is much more capable.

While it shares the same form factor as the Arduino Leonardo—with 14 digital and 5 analog pins—all of the digital pins except the Rx/Tx pins can act as PWM pins, and the analog pins have a 12-bit ADC instead of the Leonardo’s 10-bit ADC, giving significantly better analog resolution.

maker-faire-bay-area-logo-2014The new board comes with 256KB of Flash memory, and 32KB of SRAM. In comparison the 8-bit Leonardo which uses the Atmel ATmega32u4 comes with just 32KB of Flash memory and 2.5KB of SRAM. While the new board doesn’t have EEPROM, it does support 16KB by emulation, so Arduino sketches relying on this feature will still run without issue.

Like the Arduino Due, the first Arduino micro-controller to be based on an ARM core, the new Zero runs at 3.3V while there is a 5V power pin on the board in the usual place, it looks like the voltage of the rest of the digital and analog pins is 3.3V rather than the normal 5V—so any shields you use with the board will have to be 3.3V compatible.

One of the interesting differences about board layout of the Zero is the addition of an extra micro-USB port. While information is pretty thin on the ground at the moment, the SAMD21 supports both USB Host and Device mode, so it’s possible that that extra port is to support that functionality. Although its also possible that this USB port could be dedicated to support Atmel’s Embedded Debugger (EDBG) as this is the first Arduino board to support this feature. EDBG is an interesting addition—it provides as it provides a full debug interface without the need for additional hardware.

The first prototypes of the new board will be on display at the Arduino (#204), Atmel (#205) and ARM (#405) booths at Maker Faire Bay Area, which kicks off in just two days time. So see you at the faire, the greatest show (and tell) on Earth!

Arduino Yún

Announced earlier in the year at Maker Faire Bay Area, the Arduino Yún is the first Linux-based Arduino board putting it in a unique position—at least for now—in the Arduino hardware lineup. It combines a Atmega32U4-based “classic” Arduino, similar to the Ardunio Leonardo, embedded directly on the same board as a Wi-Fi system-on-a-chip running Linino—a MIPS Linux distribution based around OpenWRT.

Arduino Tre

The new Arduino Tre board. Near-side of board: USB (left), HDMI (middle) and Audio In/Out (right). Far-side of the board: 5V power jack (left), micro-USB (lift-middle), Ethernet (right-middle) and USB (right). In the middle we have GPIO headers for the ARM processor, along with Arduino form-factor headers for the AVR processor. Right in the middle are headers to insert an XBee radio.

Arduino Duemilanove