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As the article itself is undated, it's hard to tell how old this info is.

Looking at some of the follow up comments at the bottom of the article, they're from 2017 onwards.

So, the article itself may be becoming dated at this point.



This article is very out of date.

I used it for research in a project month ago and found many of the chips it mentions are end of life / discontinued now. The prices of those chips (if available) are actually higher due to their shortages.

Realistically very few fresh project starts look at the cost of the controller (in fact most EE's are completely abstracted from it) and put more consideration toward E2E LTMC costs which includes things like firmware updates, wifi or network diagnostics, etc. I see a lot of companies going towards Linux-os and RaspberryPI-esque clones simply for the ease of development and debugging -- except when power, heat or space are important factors.

At this point the Amtel ATMega & STM32 chips pretty much dominate the hackerspace projects thanks to the libraries and strong ecosystems. As near as I can tell all the other vendors are a rounding error in marketshare of new product starts. Note: I'm excluding things like auto and appliances along with other entrenched industries who probably consume a ton of those $1 chips because they've already invested heavily in them 10+ years ago.


As an example, the modern equivalent of its STM32F0 chip would probably be an STM32G0.

STM32F030F4 ($0.55@2500) -> STM32G030F6 ($0.49@2500):

* Clock speed: 48MHz -> 64MHz

* Flash memory: 16KiB -> 32KiB

* SRAM: 4KiB -> 8KiB

* CPU core: Cortex-M0 -> Cortex-M0+

The newer chips are also on a smaller process node, so they can run off of slightly lower voltages and use a bit less power.

They're incremental improvements, but time is starting to march on...




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