Maker Faire in San Mateo

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PaulStoffregen

PaulStoffregen

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Over the next 5 days, I'll be traveling for Maker Faire in San Mateo. I'm bringing far to much to fly, so I'll be driving all-day Thursday and Monday. Robin and Erin will keep PJRC running, so orders should keep shipping normally. We always strive to ship every order the same day, or next day if placed after the shipping cut-off time.

I'll have very limited access internet access. Wifi is spotty at best with 120K people attending. Even with access, I'm probably going to spend nearly the entire time chatting with people face-to-face.

I'd like to ask regular forum contributors to keep an eye out for public threads with questions aimed directly at me, or any unanswered tech support questions. Please direct them to this thread. I'll do my best to catch up next week. If you have a specific question or issue that's still unanswered by May 22nd (who knows if I'll really get fully caught up in only 2 days...), please post a reply to bump the thread onto the "What's New" summary.

If you're at Maker Faire this weekend, look for me in the Expo Hall. The booth will have several demos of the new audio library. Real-time FFT data displaying on the OctoWS2811 1920 LED test board should be easy to spot from quite some distance. ;)

Also look for this large sign to find the booth among the 300+ exhibits in the Expo Hall.

posters.png
 
No doubt Paul knows the status of finalization of library structure...
According to the lead guy for Visual Micro, the current Arduino release reflects the agreement on libraries and nothing is likely to change for quite a while.
I hope he's right.
 
stevech said:
According to the lead guy for Visual Micro, the current Arduino release reflects the agreement on libraries and nothing is likely to change for quite a while.
Click to expand...

Yesterday Micheal Shiloh (of the Arduino Team) showed me a web-based Arduino IDE 2.0 running on his laptop. So far, I know very little about it. I'm sure I'll learn more today. I believe it's safe to say things are indeed changing again....

They're also announcing "Arduino Zero" based on an Atmel "D21" Cortex-M0+ processor. It appears to have specs slightly below Teensy 3.1. As usual, no word on the retail price, or when it'll really be available.
 
IMO, the M0 line is too small of a step from the high end AVRs, esp. considering the small cost deltas for next step up in the M's.
Mercifully, it does leave behind the dual-address space (Harvard) AVR and all the "_P" hacks with GCC which is evermore staunchly von Neumann. The ARMs are all von Neumann for flash and RAM of course.
http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardZero
they are using the ATSAMD21G18; 256KB flash, 32KB RAM.
http://hackaday.com/2014/05/15/introducing-the-arduino-zero/

Big improvement over the AVRs, but in short order, I'd think they'd regret choosing an M0.

Interesting... but I like having both 64KB RAM and moreso, a Teensy size, for what I fiddle with.

=== on topic ===
The question "new library structure to go unchanged long enough" - to warrant Teensy upgrading from the aging 1.0.5 - hardware aside.
 
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PaulStoffregen said:
They're also announcing "Arduino Zero" based on an Atmel "D21" Cortex-M0+ processor. It appears to have specs slightly below Teensy 3.1. As usual, no word on the retail price, or when it'll really be available.
Click to expand...

arduino_zero_angle_top_5407-100268192-large.jpg


Arduino Uno style form factor. I see they got help from Atmel this time, and it includes some sort of debugging support (there is a JTAG connector and unlike DUE it is actually soldered on).
256k flash, 32kb RAM. 3.3V, five 12bits ADC (no mention of ENOB) and a single 10bit DAC. The debugger provides a virtual com port for programming.
edit: Effective Number Of Bits With gain compensation
differential mode 10.5 typ 11.1 max
single ended mode 9.5 typ 9.8 max
Crystal is by Fox, 12Mhz, suspect FQ5032B in which case ±30ppm (Teensies are 16MHz ±5ppm)
Some sort of touch support. RTC (looks like the xtal is included).
http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardZero
http://blog.arduino.cc/2014/05/15/meet-arduino-zero/
Not stated, but presumably requires Arduino 1.5.x beta

Atmel SAM D21

Not having seen it but based on that data its large, underpowered and uninteresting. I would be astonished if it comes in less than 1.5x the Teensy 3.1 price, while providing 0.5x the functionality. No mention of 5V hardening (so the shield compatibility with the 5V Uno looks like a mixed blessing). The debug feature is potentially useful, if integrated into the Arduino IDE.
 
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Yeah looks nice, the Zero.

32bit on Uno formfactor so it's nice to look at, but I didin't see Arduino and Teensy in competitive, more as brothers on the same table with different interrests, slightly different DNA, nearly the same upbringing but different orientation.
 
It would be cool if the next teensy could have debug capabilities with just the single USB port.
 
Frank B said:
My Wishlist: floating point unit, more ram. k22 or better..
Click to expand...
I used to think in the non-graphic/non-audio embedded world I used to think floating point wasn't used that much, but I keep seeing posts about people doing lots of FP (the biggest use seems to be in doing GPS calculations, but it probably also comes up in doing trig. calculations for robotics). As I recall the Freescale chip that Paul uses for the Teensy's does have a variant that does single precision floating point (but not double). Having single precision support is helpful to some things that need floating point, but it would be nice to have both single and double supported in hardware.

And of course Paul is adding a lot of audio support right now. Some audio just wants to use vector integers (which the chip has some limited support for), but I recall some things do use floating point.

Graphics also tends to need floating point, but right now, if you want to do that, you would be better served stepping up to the small Linux boxes (Rasberry Pi, Beagle Bone Black, pcDunio, etc.) since they run at a much higher clock rate, have both single/double hardware support, and have much more memory available. But those systems don't run in the space/power constraints that work for the Teensy.

It is kind of amusing, as right now for work, I am in the middle of adding emulated IEEE 128-bit floating point support to the PowerPC GCC compiler. PowerPC has used a different representation for long double (that uses a pair of doubles), but we are seeing requirements for IEEE 128-bit, even if it is software emulated (same as the Intel compiler is seeing some push for it).
 
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I went to the Massimo Banzi talk Sat 18th. The IDE 2.0 talked about as running off the Arduino TRE Sitarro processor - a JS IDE.
The Beagle Bone Black (TI Sitarro) has been using the Cloud9 JS ide, so it could be variant of that
Part of the discussion was IDE 2.0 has a smart database that could configure the compiler output for the hardware.
The announcement was with the TI designer of the Beagle Bone Black.
Massimo also talked about beta qtys of the board available (Euro149 on website) and being sold out in 4hours. (the message I got was ARM is the way to go, and the market is bearing a higher price - however Beagle Bone Black rev C 4Gflash/512Mram $55 and latest Arm Linux 3.12+ has better hw access support - still 1A@5V to power it )
The Arduino Zero was announced after that but no pricing visible anywhere. The SAMD21 Cortex-M0 max voltage input 3.6V, even though it has USB and 32Kram. A comparison of M0 and M4 is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-M
The MK20 is fantastic of course on power/functions, and there is a newer MK64 released on standard Arduino footprint, and part of mbed.com offering.
https://mbed.org/platforms/FRDM-K64F/
which seems largely pin-for-pin compatible with the MK20, but has an ethernet interface, more RAM - and seems to be missing the PGA on the ADC.
IMHO the big issue with any linux offering is to watch the version and the power. ARM have worked on BoardSupportPackage with a Device Tree -from Linux version 3.12.
http://www.devicetree.org/Main_Page
The idea of having two processors - one a linux machine and the other a smaller processor - has been put into silicon with the Freescale Colbri V50/V61 -
eg
http://developer.toradex.com/product-selector/colibri-vf50 - however there linux version doesn't support it - so expect linux hardware access to become much easier, including some management of power consumption - but just how low can it go is the big question.
 
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MichaelMeissner said:
Graphics also tends to need floating point, but right now, if you want to do that, you would be better served stepping up to the small Linux boxes (Rasberry Pi, Beagle Bone Black, pcDunio, etc.) since they run at a much higher clock rate, have both single/double hardware support, and have much more memory available. But those systems don't run in the space/power constraints that work for the Teensy.
Click to expand...

I need a small bare system just like the teensy, and I'm using FP for graphics. A chip like the MK22FN512VLH12 would be perfect for that. The Teensy 3.1 will does the job just fine, because I have access to the SPI and DMA for driving my display. That's something I (personally) could not do with a raspberry pi. But a chip with more power would allow me to implement more of the eye-candy ideas I have in mind.

Regards

Christoph
 
For those who didn't get to Maker Faire, I was surprised to see Freescale had a large RGB LED display and audio playback all playing off of a teensy 3.1 w/uSD card. It was a cool demo and they spoke fondly of the teensy 3.1.
 
MichaelMeissner said:
I used to think in the non-graphic/non-audio embedded world I used to think floating point wasn't used that much,
Click to expand...

As for the fpu: It's just a wish, not a must. Since this is just a hobby, I would be happy about it because it would simplify/speedup things sometimes.
e.g. I build balancing robot with gyro, compass and accelerometers. Or, one of my planned projects is a MP3 decoder software,running on a teensy (maybe teensy 3.1++? )

The floating point unit is it not a "must" for these projects, but "nice to have". The cost-factor is not so important for a hobbyist as for industry - so when i could have it for 5$ more - why not :)
 
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You mean something like this?

It's Arm. It's Wifi, It's Ethernet, It's SD. It's Small 78mmx28mm for Ethernet version 51mmx28mm for wifi only version. Oh and it's Teensy bootloaded.
 

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I'd go for one of those as pictured. Maybe. Product? Or OEM?

Marginally small! The Wiz820io is a nice, small, smart, ethernet interface, not much larger than a normal RJ45 jack.
 
I have the original mbed module. Despite 2 or 3 tries at a stable IP stack for the on-chip NIC, some 2-3 years later still no stable stack. It's hard.
I guess that's why WizNet has a business.

Thus, I noted with concern that the new Atmel ARM based Arduino Zero comes with zero for an IP stack, for now. Deja Vous.
 
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