Any arduino coders here?

[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)

[wilfy]

the uno which is the bigger board with header for easy connections to a bread board is £20.82 + postage i'd say this is board you use over and over again until you are ready to shrink your design in to something smaller which is when you could reduce that down to a pro mini which is just a bit bigger then your average thumb print but does all the same stuff as an uno as far as i/o's go, but i'll be honest i'm not sure other than the dc jack and the usb port what difference there is between the 2.

i dont have a clue what i PIC is but when i get a bit of time later i'll have a gander. the reason for me to use an arduino is due to the fact they seem quite popular and have a lot of code floating around and i'm starting to pick up and understand certain bits of code. add to that i have a close friend who is very good with arduino coding i'm pretty sure i could go to him with something i am not sure about and he'd be able to do it. i bought my uno in a kit wire loads of wires, resistors led's ect to get me going.

[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...

[Iwant1]

When I started building small electric projects a few years back, I turned to the Picaxe system. They use standard Pics loaded with their own firmware to make programming easy for hobbyists, and it is really easy with their examples. You can buy a prototype board like the arduino, all setup for your input/output devices, or the way I do, buy the cheap chip where you only have to build a simple program download circuit. Just checking a chip with 16 input/outputs works out at £2.40.

My next project will be using the arduino uno just to see what the fuss is about.

[Saracen]

> £13.50 (arduino pro mini)

Blimey. I buy mine from China for less than a fiver, shipped.

The PIC vs AVR feud is up there with Pepsi vs Coke and Ford vs Holden and quite fun to watch from the ring side

Adrian.

[wilfy]

i'm not aware of the feud nor do i care, i just use arduino as thats what a friend has so it's easier to go to him if he has the same stuff.. i havnt dabbled with electronic like this before so for me the fact i can spend £30 for a full kit to let me do whatever i like is fine by me. as for pro mini's for a fiver from china.. are we taking ebay? if not could you point me in that direction please :D

[m_c]

Pictures of the servo mountings would be useful. Looking at your pictures on Flickr, I think you have a more advanced model than my own. My own is a Matchmaker and very different to yours in quite a few aspects. Yours seems to be reminiscent of a true Shizuoka CNC unit where as my own is a Matchmaker conversion. I am not too impressed with Matchmaker's workmanship on my machine, although that is no longer an issue as most of it has gone. Luckily my quill lubrication is very visible, so I should have no problems there. Your summit toolchanger is again, radically different to mine, it looks tidier. I have considered losing the ram and replacing it with a stepper and rotary encoder as a substitute for the microswitch and cam system on the top. As you say an Arduino would be good for this type of purpose. I haven't decided whether or not to scrap the geneva mech on the carousel yet, it seems to work quite well on my unit and with a delay programmed into the Arduino code I think it may be OK. Have you had your toolchanger working yet? I had a problem with mine when I first tried to get it to work in maual. I ended up having it in pieces half a dozen time 'till I found the problem. It is quite a neat action that it does and the novelty of it working still amuses me. As for tooling, the Erickson type seems to be reasonably plentyful on Ebay although I have a lot of ISO 40 stuff and may make a new set of claws for it , who knows?

I'll try and get some pics over the weekend.
Going by what I found stripping the X-axis, I'd say mine did originally have steppers, and the servos were part of the Heindenhain retrofit, which was done by a company I can't currently remember the name of. Underneath the covers, lots of bits havn't been painted, whereas all the original bits are painted all over. Where is the lubrication for your quill?
I've never had the toolchanger working, as I had to cut the wiring to the front control panel to get the head off. The original plan had been to unbolt the head, spin it around on the mounting boss, and bolt it on at 90deg to get under the door. However that plan quickly failed, when we realised the boss wasn't machined the way we thought it was and there was no way we were going to get it spun, so had to remove it completely. Only quick solution was to cut all the wiring to the switches, as it was soldered on with no connectors.

I was hoping you'd maybe bought some new toolholders, as I'd like to get a couple ER holders to start with. From my research, DIN2080 holders should fit, but I was hoping someone could confirm!


And for clarity, if any of the mods read this, could they split all this Shizouka talk into a seperate thread?

[m_c]

AVR v PIC debates are always good :-)

A PIC system similar to an Uno is a comparable price, and when I looked last year, PIC compilers were not exactly user friendly.
Each have their own strengths and weaknesses, but for simplicity Arduino does currently have quite a lead, and the standard layout with lots of 'sheilds' (aka stackable expansion boards) makes prototyping far easier.

I use Mega's, Uno's and Pro Mini's. Uno's I've currently got 3 off as I use them for general development. One of my current projects will be getting shrunk from an Uno and breadboard to a custom PCB running an Atmega328 with the UNO bootloader. Final cost is very similar to using a PIC, but I get the benefit of using the Arduino programming.
The Mega's are used for a similar, but more complex system. This could be done far cheaper with a custom PCB and an Atmega somewhere between the 2550 and 328, but I only need 3, so using the Mega eliminates dealing with a chip not officially supported by Arduino.
And the Pro Mini's are for a display controller, which i only need 2 off, so other options work out more expensive. The Pro-Mini sits neatly inside the housing, with the display and serial connector wires connected straight to it, without needing any protoboards.

[D.C.]

> £13.50 (arduino pro mini)

Blimey. I buy mine from China for less than a fiver, shipped.

The PIC vs AVR feud is up there with Pepsi vs Coke and Ford vs Holden and quite fun to watch from the ring side

Adrian.

It seems quite similar to the ubuntu VS linux flavour 'X' debates, ubuntu/arduino decide to make it their mission in life to get more people interested in linux/embedded and did so by dumbing things down a lot. At the end of the day who gives a crap, just go make some stuff, if you are a bitter old god of electrons stick with what you know and amaze the world, if you are a nublet go with the new trendy shiny thing and shake things up with your leetness. They are just tools, it's how you use them that counts...

[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)