Any arduino coders here?

[HankMcSpank]

When I decided I needed to wield power over a 'puter on a chip, I looked at Arduinos for a few nanoseconds (up until the point when I saw the price at which point I projectiled vomited)....I then renewed my cheapskate pledge & went the way of a PIC instead.

[wilfy]

When I decided I needed to wield power over a 'puter on a chip, I looked at Arduinos for a few nanoseconds (up until the point when I saw the price at which point I projectiled vomited)....I then renewed my cheapskate pledge & went the way of a PIC instead.

how can £13.50 (arduino pro mini) be too expensive for a small device with 13 i/o's and access to a growing library of pre-written code that is free to use and amend to suit your needs?

[HankMcSpank]

how can £13.50 (arduino pro mini) be too expensive for a small device with 13 i/o's and access to a growing library of pre-written code that is free to use and amend to suit your needs?

Cos it's six times more expensive than a PIC that has 13 IOs and a growing library of pre-written code :-)

(would you pay £6 for a litre of milk, if you can get the same thing for a £1 ...albeit with more basic packaging)

IMHO an arduino is fine if you just want to dabble with a bit of digital & need some of the lifting done for you ....but if you have an eye on integrating an MCU into an actual circuit - & a circuit that might have legs & be floated out into the general marketplace - then a PIC etc is the way to go....I guess it depends on your end goal, but I'd rather be paying £2.00 for a CPU solution for each of my project-ettes/challenges than £13.50.

Re the £13.50 price, Arduinos must have come down a fair in price since the time I had to mop my wall down, cos I'm sure back then they were nearer £20 a pop (so in my eyes at least, it was a no brainer back then ....£20 vs. £2)

[D.C.]

When I decided I needed to wield power over a 'puter on a chip, I looked at Arduinos for a few nanoseconds (up until the point when I saw the price at which point I projectiled vomited)....I then renewed my cheapskate pledge & went the way of a PIC instead.

I think you are slightly misunderstanding what an arduino is. You get a full prototyping board and 'environment', once you have finished prototyping you use an atmel IC in your production device which even if you are going to buy from farnell start at 38 english pence ex vat...

[HankMcSpank]

I think you are slightly misunderstanding what an arduino is. You get a full prototyping board and 'environment', once you have finished prototyping you use an atmel IC in your production device which even if you are going to buy from farnell start at 38 english pence ex vat...

Fair enough....I should perhaps wind my neck in then (my full prototyping enviroment is a breadboard & box of caps/resistors!). Does the arduino proto enviroment allow you to swap around the MCU pins? ....so for example if the HPWM pin is on pin 3, with a PIC you can often switch a module (HPWM, UART etc) to another pin via an internal register setting - of course you then have to swap around all the connections to marry up with the new pin config - are the arduino pins hardwired per function? Such pin swap flexibility is quite important for best pcb layout. Obviously, once you've done your coding, the next step is to get it onto a pcb layout....and it's best to proto with the same pin config you're gonna have on your pcb layout (and being able to swap the pins about aka PIC is very useful towards helping the best pcb layout)