On 1/14/12 9:18 PM, Chris Albertson wrote:
Not over kill at all. It is worth paying a few $$ not to have to
design a PCB. Worse then that is that most will take shortcuts and
design it so that you need a sppepcial IC programmer to program the
PIC. Thee $20 development boards allow you to download the firmware
over USB so users can do it themselves.
I'm looking at this pair of boards:
http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoEthernetShield
http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardUno
Ethernet and and SD card slot might seem overkill too. But I want to
track performance, read out the phase difference over time and so one.
So I want to be able to connect a desktop computer and a USB cable is
to short. Ethernet will let me check from work or with my phone.
the SD card can be used to log data. Likely hold a two years of data
on a 8GB card.
I've got just that pair.. several of them.
It's great..what's nice about Arduino is that you can just go buy one at
Radio Shack. For a lot of applications, it's a nice simple solution
with minimal hassles and fooling around.
Examples get you started with things like simple webservers, etc.
The Arduino language is a sort of C, and for some reason Arduino land
uses non standard jargon (sketches, shields), but it's not too bad.
I had a summer intern who had never programmed before in his life turn
one into a controller to cycle three solenoid valves in a couple weeks.
If you like PICs, that works too. There are off the shelf boards, etc.
that work fairly well.
What all of these don't do well is complex stuff. If your program gets
over, say, 1000 lines, you're probably trying to do too much for that
little machine. It's not a multitasking operating system with disk
drives, etc. Even if there ARE a lot of libraries that make it seem
like a full-up environment (e.g. BSD sockets, file systems on SD) it
really isn't. it's still a little embedded microcontroller.
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