Teensy or Arduino?

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antometa

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Hi to all, i'm new member, from italy but live en mexico.
Make a midi controller using Arduino mega flashed with moco lufa y Nextion display connected via serial. But i have buy, 1 year ago, one Teensy 4 and one LC for another project and i want to replace the Arduino mega with the Teensy 4 (or LC?). The question is, why i need to replace arduino with Teensy? Sorry for this stupid question, but the upgrade to Teensy change all the project and i don't know the teensy board. If decide move to Teensy, i hope find help on this forum.
Sorry for the maccaronic taco english
 
Hi,
Put simply, the Teensy 4 is orders of magnitude faster than the Arduino Mega. It has more hardware resources available, faster clock speeds, more electronic interface options (SPI, I2C, UART, etc).
If the Mega works for what you want to do, then there is not much need to change.

But if you want better performance or to do things that the Mega cannot, then a Teensy will give you more options.


It is like buying a Fiat or a Ferrari to get to work. The fiat will get you to work just the same as the Ferrari will, but if you took it to a race track, the Ferrari will be more fun ;)
 
antometa said:
Hi to all, i'm new member, from italy but live en mexico.
Make a midi controller using Arduino mega flashed with moco lufa y Nextion display connected via serial. But i have buy, 1 year ago, one Teensy 4 and one LC for another project and i want to replace the Arduino mega with the Teensy 4 (or LC?). The question is, why i need to replace arduino with Teensy? Sorry for this stupid question, but the upgrade to Teensy change all the project and i don't know the teensy board. If decide move to Teensy, i hope find help on this forum.
Sorry for the maccaronic taco english
Click to expand...

The Mega has more I/O pins, which might be very useful for something like a MIDI controller, saving the need for I/O expanders.

But the Teensy 4 is extremely fast, and has hardware floating point, which is useful for when some processing grunt is needed
(not perhaps essential for a MIDI controller). Its power consumption is higher, for battery equipment this may be important.

If you need the processing power, say for DSP, or the RAM, go Teensy, if you need lots of inputs and don't need DSP or lots of
memory, Mega looks good (I use the Seeed Studio's version of the Mega as it has more pins and smaller footprint)

If everything is 5V, that's awkward for the Teensy 4 as level shifters will be needed.

Pick the tool for the job really...
 
MarkT said:
The Mega has more I/O pins, which might be very useful for something like a MIDI controller, saving the need for I/O expanders.
Click to expand...

Well the Teensy 4.1 actually has 55 digital pins (the Mega 2560 has 54 digital pins), but to get to pins 42-54, you will need to solder wires to the solder pads underneath the Teensy, and to use something to bring out the pins in the micro SD card.

The Teensy 4.1 actually has 18 analog input pins (the Mega 2560 has 16 analog input pins) and all of them are easily accessible. So if you need analog inputs for MIDI, the Teensy wins.

The Teensy 4.1 has 8 serial UART ports while the Mega 2560 only has 4.

The Teensy 4.1 can use 35 digital pins as PWM pins (used to rapidly switch ports on/off, to either 'dim' LEDs or control servos) while the Mega 2560 has 15 PWM pins.

The Teensy 4.1 has 8 megabytes of flash memory (minus 64K for system support) while the Mega 2560 has 256K (with 8K reserved for the bootloader).

The Teensy 4.1 has two sets of 512K read/write memories built-in, while the Mega 2560 has 8K. In addition, with the Teensy 4.1, you can solder on one or two 8 megabyte (64 megabit) flash memory chips to the Teensy to give you a lot more read/write memory (but in general, the access will be slower than the main memories). Or you can solder 1 chip for read/write memory and another chip that gives persistent storage (such as you get with a SD card) that you can mount a filesystem on. I use 16 megabyte (128 megabit) persistent flash memory chips on my Teensy 4.1's.

Both have similar sizes for 'EEPROM' persistent memory (4,284 bytes for the Teensy 4.1, 4096 for the Mega 2560). As I mentioned above, you can solder in a persistent memory chip on to the Teensy 4.1 for more space.

The Teensy 4.1 has a built-in micro SD card reader. The Mega 2560 does not, but you can attach a simple SPI micro SD card reader if needed.

The Teensy 4.1 runs on 3.3v, and is NOT tolerant of 5v input. The Mega 2560 runs on 5v.

The Teensy 4.1 runs at clock speeds up to 600Mhz. The Mega 2560 runs at 16Mhz. In addition, since the Mega 2560 is an 8-bit processor, the compiler typically has to issue several instructions to do normal operations, while the Teensy 4.1 can do many of these operations in a single instruction.

The Teensy 4.1 has hardware support for single and double precision floating point. I believe the Mega 2560 uses software emulation.
 
The Seeed studios Mega has >80 pins all on headers, although IIRC you have to solder some of them in yourself if needed. Yes,
no hardware floating point on the Mega, all emulated and slow. If you go the AVR Mega route I'd recommend having a look at it,
seen reliable service in some prototype instrumentation setup for a previous job with them 24/7. But its still just a 16MHz 8-bit
machine with tiny memory as pointed out: https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/Seeeduino_Mega/

This all makes me wonder if there are some T4 breakouts on the horizon to fit standard Arduino shields - like a revamp of
this one for the T3.5/3.6 perhaps?
https://www.pjrc.com/megadue-shield-breakout-board/
 
MarkT said:
This all makes me wonder if there are some T4 breakouts on the horizon to fit standard Arduino shields - like a revamp of
this one for the T3.5/3.6 perhaps?
Click to expand...
I've thought about it. But honestly, most of the arduino shields are an exercise super low density. I'd rather create appropriate sized boards that take the Teensy form factors - kind of like feathers. The teensys are all muscle, no fat. Would love for Paul to come out with a iMXRT 1062 compute module with 4 rows of pins instead of two (and lots and lots of I/O pins, of course). Even more muscle. The Arduino form factor really should just go off to the PCB graveyard and die... It served it's purpose, time to move on.
 
MarkT said:
This all makes me wonder if there are some T4 breakouts on the horizon to fit standard Arduino shields - like a revamp of
this one for the T3.5/3.6 perhaps?
https://www.pjrc.com/megadue-shield-breakout-board/
Click to expand...

Tindie has two breakout boards for Teensy 4.1. I'm not sure if the second board brings out of the Teensy pins in a form factor for the Mega 2560:

There is this breakout board for the Teensy 4.0. I bought it, and I had issues with the micro SD card, so I haven't played with it much since then. Note, I have the revision 1.0 board, and in the notes, the author says there were changes made to prevent the issues with the micro SD card:

Note: In Rev 2 of the board, pins 34-37 are connected via open solder jumpers to prevent the long traces from interferring with the MicroSD card.


And some other Teensy 4.0 breakout boards:
 
Many, many thanks to all the persons that response.

The schematic use the Mega with a multiplexor 74hc4067, with a voltage of 5V, but Teensy work with signal of 3.3 V max.
The datasheet of 4067 say that he work from 2V and i will not have problem. Is true?
I had a lot of problems with noise of the analog input of the Arduino. How Teensy work with the noise of the analog input?
The question came to me because the signal pass from 5V to 3.3.

P.d. how to add photos to posts in this forum?
 
Yes the 74HC family work from 2V to 6V I believe. The speed will be a bit slower at 3.3V than 5V, probably not an issue.

If you need to step up from 3.3V signals to 5V signals the 74HCT family is useful, input levels work with 3.3V logic but its
powered and outputs 5.0V.

To convert 5V to 3.3V the 74LVC and 74LCX families have 5V tolerant inputs I believe (they need 3.3V power, note). Double
the datasheets though to be sure(!)
 
MichaelMeissner said:
Tindie has two breakout boards for Teensy 4.1. I'm not sure if the second board brings out of the Teensy pins in a form factor for the Mega 2560:
Click to expand...

The second board (grblHAL Breakout...) does not support the Mega formfactor - it uses screw terminals for connections, appropriate for a high vibration milling machine environment.
 
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