A nice improvement, but maybe too little too late?
I mean, what's the point? An ESP32 has 320K SRAM, 448K Flash and a 240 MHz dual core CPU. And it costs peanuts. That's the competition to beat, and this doesn't reach it, even though the ESP32 came out in 2016.
The Arduino has been resting on its laurels for too long, I'm afraid. There's long been things out there much faster and cheaper, and with wifi out there for a long time.
EDIT: And why not just use one of these, which is already for sale?
Arduino never made sense as far as technical specs go. You could always buy more capable and compatible AVR microcontrollers for one tenth the price. In the past decade, the disparity has gotten more dramatic as 8-bit chips have gotten even cheaper and even more capable.
Arduino owed its success solely to building a healthy maker ecosystem of folks who simply defaulted to it as a platform, published tutorials, and promoted it through word-of-mouth. That's probably still there. Raspberry Pi had the same thing going on for it, by the way.
Marketing / community building trumps technical merit in almost everything, and embedded computing is not an exception. I'm not lamenting this, it's just a fact of life.
Arduino is also orders of magnitude lower friction than just about any other embedded platform. Baremetal AVR? Set up your makefile, ICSP programmer, and find the right fuse flags or risk bricking your chip with the wrong clock settings. STM32? Set up the whole STM32CubeMx project and export it as a Makefile and remember to only add code in the correct areas? Baremetal ESP32/ESP8266? Doesn't exist, but you can use a FreeRTOS fork with special binary blobs. PIC microcontrollers? Set up Microchip's HUGE IDE and special compilers and programming tools.
A board supported by Arduino is vastly easier to use, especially for someone who just wants their project to _work_, not to learn the deep arcana of baremetal systems.
I don't know how many people have a high voltage programmer, especially the people that would choose an Arduino. I'm personally lucky to have found an AVRISP mkII that was being thrown away when I was a broke college student.
Either way, I'm saying that Arduino is _the_ microcontroller platform with the fewest gotchas for a beginner.
One thing that was unique about the 8-bit Arduino was that while the board itself was common for prototyping, it wasn't that hard to put an AVR chip on a breadboard for permanent projects or just for the sake of doing it and there were plenty of tutorials. There was even built-in support in the IDE for using an Arduino board as a ISP programmer for a raw chip by connecting a few wires.
With the Raspberry Pi, hardly anyone who used it would ever build their own/modify the design of the board itself.
With the massive difference in abilities and price between ESP32 based boards and Arduino, and the increasing number of shields available for common ESP32 boards, I think Arduino has lost a lot of the "community" advantage.
It's a shame there isn't a "standard" ESP32 board though. Some of the common boards/kits even have multiple revisions that aren't pin-compatible :(
The ESP32 and ESP8266 are significantly more complex and come with a bunch of downsides that make an already difficult venture into the "hardware land" even more so. Watchdog timeout or some other exception, you'll get a stacktrace that requires a fragile Java piece of software to decode, and it only does that to some extent. It's seriously not pleasant.
In my anecdotal experience the ESPs are also not as robust against mistreatment as the AVRs are. According to the datasheet they shouldn't survive as much as they seem to.
So while the hardware might be better, and there is always better hardware out there, it's sometimes worth to avoid the complexity.
The ESP is compatible with the Arduino IDE. I've found it as easy to program as any other microcontroller. (Though I have encountered watchdog issues with unoptimized code)
As long as you stay within the guide rails and libraries provided by the IDE.
The average user cannot debug the RTOS running on an ESP, a single Cortex-M4 is more complex than an AVR but still understandable down to bare metal by your average enthusiast.
I'm in the middle of porting a project from arduino to esp-idf. If you want to do anything slightly complex with the Bluetooth stack, those features just don't exist in the arduino core. It's very frustrating.
That's why I typically prefer to build my base application on a standalone processor and export Bluetooth or Wifi duties to an nRF52820 or ATWILC1000.
Yes, the processor required to run these network protocols is pretty beefy, so a big and fast chip like those made by Espressif has plenty of capacity to run your own app alongside the big communication stacks, but it's far simpler and more power efficient to let a small and simple Bluetooth chip do only Bluetooth stuff, and power it up or down as needed and talk to it over SPI or whatever from a host processor that you have full control of.
Once I learned how to use STMCubeMX, I never went back to Arduino. Comparing STM boards with Arduino in terms of price, RAM, Flash, GPIO, analog, ... and R4 looks like Steve Buscemi doing the "hello fellow kids" meme. I think the big win for Arduino was the ecosystem and simplicity, but the big embedded players have invested significantly in this space with tons of code examples compatible with the arduino add ins (STM boards all have the arduino header).
ESP doesn't scale. Once you start with STM, you can switch to much more advanced boards with ease, ESP doesn't have the range.
I think Arduino and ESP32 have different goals. One is more of an educational tool targeting children and adults to automate simple stuff and learning to program microcontrollers in a simplified way and the other is focusing on more industrial solutions where performance, price and flexibility matters.
So I am not sure they are competitors. Like Intel and Raspberry Pi aren't competitors as they address very different markets.
One is more of an educational tool targeting children and adults to automate simple stuff and learning to program microcontrollers in a simplified way
Ok, but then Micro:Bit is much nicer. It has a Nordic nRF52833, so Bluetooth LE, accelerometer, magnetometer, MEMS microphone, buzzer, 5x5 led matrix, tactile push buttons, and a touch sensor button. And it's easy to program with MakeCode (our daughter programmed it when she was 5 or 6) and MicroPython. It's easy to program, supports crocodile chips. And even the bundle with battery holder and batteries is cheaper than an Uno.
Addressing specific markets only works if you do it uniquely or better. The simplified Arduino tooling works on the ESP32, which is also the cheaper and better option.
But that Arduino tooling and all the libraries, tutorials, etc. wouldn't exist if nobody had bought Arduinos. If I'm just buying a few boards for personal projects I like to support companies that provide more than just hardware to the maker community.
I'm not into Arduinos but I think they are not selling their products because they have the largest RAM or the fastest CPU but because of the Arduino IDE, the language and the community.
Yeap. My first attempts to move away from Arduino were an absolute nightmare, even though I treated it as a development board and had ditched the Arduino libraries. There was too much inconsistent information from the community about third-party STM32 boards. ESP32 boards were okay given my skill level, but I certainly wouldn't recommend them for novices. The relatively recent Pi Pico was a refreshing change due to the consistent documentation, but it is something where you have to be willing to sit down and read the documentation. And that is only considering programming the things, you still have to build something around it.
I'm sure there are good alternative to the Arudino out there. Arduino certainly wasn't the first to market with beginner friendly development boards and the popularity of Arudino only attracted more companies to the market. Unfortunately, it would be difficult to figure out who to go with since there is so much meaningless noise out there.
The Arduino hardware abstraction layer has really been one of the biggest steps towards a more universal and interoperable set of software for bare silicon. Yet as you experienced, even then it wasn't enough to bridge the gap fully.
The fact that we call other boards "Arduino alternatives" is partially a testament to that. (Say, instead of "AVR alternatives")
It's certainly not perfect, always the fastest, doesn't expose all the features one might need, but it makes prototyping and portability oh so much easier. I'm glad we have something.
This was also my path. I'm still surprised that stm32 development is not more widely taught. I'm also surprised that products like the leaflabs maple didn't take over.
The ESP32 can be programmed through the Arduino IDE, using the exact same language. I've done that.
Now the ESP32 as usually delivered is not pin or voltage compatible, but surely that's not that hard of a problem. Just make an Arduino shaped board for it, and use a level shifter?
So now you need to add a level shifer increase the number of mistakes and the risk of ruining your board. Your solution makes life of hobbyists less enjoyable IMHO.
The GPIO are not level shifted in the board you link.
I think the suggestion is to make an electrically compatible Uno board by incorporating the level shifters onto the board. The end user wouldn't have to think about them because they are already there.
Of course I don't mean I expect a beginner to get a board made so that they can use a surface mount level shifter for their beginner project.
My question here is why the weird approach? Why have two MCUs on a board, and have the one that the user interacts with be the technically inferior one?
Why not just make a better version of the ESPRIT? Just add a level shifter to it, and there you go: form factor compatible, 5V compatible, and more powerful than Arduino's not yet released project. And probably cheaper to manufacture than the two MCU design they came up with.
And yeah, you can use exactly the same IDE and API for the ESP32.
Renesas had been trying to get into Arduino market, previously with Gadget Renesas efforts. Arduino is expanding more into (over-bloated...) industrial control applications for heavy industries. There, I would assume, the both parties saw aligned interests to have a Renesas chip in the center of a new Arduino(maybe ARM might be in it too).
Performance must have been a non-issue, they make everything from timers for rice cookers to custom ISA smartphone SoCs. It must have been just an option that is good enough, easily available and comfortably low-tech to let to an enthusiast with an SEM in his basement.
Though does Arduino really amount to something measurable to a giant like Renesas? And I presume that Arduino plans to keep the IDE and API, so not like 99% of people would be learning anything about the details of Renesas' chips.
Renesas/then-Hitachi H8 and Microchip PIC were popular in Japanese EE colleges and Universities. The H8 was always a bit too advanced, more popular in more niche robotics than plain EE, and must have been not too important for Renesas. But the latter was blown away entirely by AVR as Arduino came around and created a whole hobbyist industry.
IDE and API won't be issues, it's just bare C/C++ and APIs are just extra standard libraries. But the popularity of Arduino and ATmega328P/ATmega32U, its expanded talent pools, etc must be somewhat tempting and potentially-vital-looking for Renesas, while also not too tempting nor threatening to make substantial changes to its operations and focus on over the counter chip sales.
Why would you need to add a level shifter. Almost every single i2c or SPI component I've used works just fine with the ESPs 3.3v or is 3.3v to 5v compatible.
The original ATMEGA328p may have said in the datasheet that it could only do 20mA for 2 pins...
But in reality, you can short all the pins to GND and then output high on all of them, and the chip survives indefinitely (although does get rather hot!).
I think I killed only one AVR in a long time tinkering. They even tolerate pretty severe over-voltage well, probably because they support EEPROM-style parallel HV programming.
However they're also pretty expensive (especially today, an m328p is over five bucks nowadays), and have been for around ten years or more.
When would you ever need more than that in the Arduino ecosystem? I haven't in a rather long time. These days I usually don't even bother with LEDs, I'll just use an addressible pixel LED.
Rather than a transistor I might just use a relay, mosfet, or motor driver module, since I can get extra features like short circuit protection and the ability to quickly swap without soldering anything, which gets exponentially more appealing the more times you have to repair something that's been made with discrete parts.
The use cases where I'd be working any other way are mostly outside of what I'd use an Uno or similar for anyway. And I probably wouldn't be using 5v at all for prototyping something to mass produce, since 3v3 is taking over.
Selling Arduinos for over $20 is utterly ridiculous when you cam get a Pi Pico for $4, ESP8266 for under $10, or an Arduino clone on AliExpress for under $4.
Power supply is only up to 16V pins are 3.3V, and it is much more expensive. They are just different products that serve different users. With Arduino you get a 100% working ecosystem there are still a lot of incompatibilities with esp32 (although a lot less these days).
I love the ESP32 and use it as the central gateway/hub in the IoT solutions I develop.
However the ESP32 power consumption is too high. TI has an ARM-based wireless sensor platform that can run for years while making measurements every five minutes.
A lot of things Arduino has been putting out recently feels like it might be too little for too late or way to high of a price.
What bothers me about this release is that they are re-using the Uno name for a product that doesn't feel at all like and Uno. I don't think they should have used the name Uno unless they were at least sticking with the AVR family and 5V compatibility, and maybe I'd go so far as to say sticking with the ATmega328.
On the sticking with a 328 side, I would have liked an Uno R4 that expanded power input supported to 24v, replaced the USB-B with USB-C, could be configured to either 3.3v or 5v (defaulting to 5v).
I think moving on to a newer AVR, such as 4808, would be good for an R4 ONLY if the majority of libraries targeting UNO would just work on it.
Personally, my favorite was the Leonardo. I have a small bin of boards in the Arduino Pro Micro form factor, except the end G/5v/TX/RX pins have been replaced with a USB connector, and the 328 was replaced with a 32u4, so they are programmed as if they were Leonardos.
But could a hobbyist who is following one of the bazillion tutorials which calls for a 2N7000 or other non-logic-level mosfet? Does that hobbyist even know what a threshold voltage is? These are barriers to entry which are removed by 5V IO.
While I love digikey’s parametric search, I’ve gotten feedback from more than one budding hack after that it is “too complicated and confusing”
Sure. So name one, that's cheap, readily available from many manufacturers, through hole, with 100mA+ or so Ids, low enough capacitance to be used with a microcontroller like ESP32.
Most of the good MOSFETs I'm aware of are SMT only, which is not beginner friendly. 2N7000 through hole is extremely available damn near everywhere. All companies have a clone of the venerated, classic MOSFET. EDIT: Its also been used in various beginner circuits for 40 years, so you can pickup an old book from the library and see those 2N7000 around and use those designs today.
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Honestly, if you're doing through-hole on ESP32, I suggest using a resistor + 2N2222 BJT instead of the MOSFET. But I think 2N7000 is easier (fewer parts, in particular no resistor needed). But that's a 5V design.
The 2N2222 also requires you to leak a decent amount of current through the Vbe / Ibe (while 2N7000 is like 1uA or less leak Vgs / Igs).
But... 5V and 2N7000 Jellybean + throughole is really easy to use. Its definitely a big advantage to Arduino IMO, and I'm glad that they're keeping the 5V driving capability in this newest version.
The 2N7000 has the minor, trifling, potentially catastrophic flaw that many (most?) of them have completely unprotected gates. (In fact, it's one of the few parts you can reliably source that still offers this feature if you should need it, say for FET party tricks.) This means that the bloody things blow up if you so much as look at them funny. You absolutely need proper ESD precautions to use these things reliably. Many a student has come to the false conclusion that they didn't understand how to use MOSFETs when, in fact, they had just inadvertently blown up some or all of their crappy old 2N7000s. This is not really what you want for a "jellybean" part.
Yes, you can be careful about this and order the right part number to get a newer protected-gate version, but at that point please do us all a favor and specify some non-stone-age part.
> In fact, it's one of the few parts you can reliably source that still offers this feature if you should need it, say for FET party tricks.
Few? Tons of MOSFETs have no ESD protection, because that ESD protection diode has uA levels of leakage current in practice. Both MOSFETs discussed in this subthread (IRL540 and AO3401A) are both unprotected MOSFETs that blowup from ESD.
In fact, no one has even listed an ESD-protected MOSFET yet.
> Yes, you can be careful about this and order the right part number to get a newer protected-gate version
Unprotected MOSFETs have nothing to do with "old" or "new". Its because that protection diode has a number of characteristics (in particular: sucking currents in a different direction than expected and changing the circuit) that needs to be carefully considered.
You can't just replace unprotected MOSFETs with protected ones and hope that your circuits work. You very well could be shorting out some circuit inadvertently.
Gate protection zeners are much more common in the more modern, higher-performance parts. So if you are used to using dinosaurs, you might think they're rare. Also, manufacturers occasionally get sloppy about noting their existence; you really need to see an I_GSS spec to be sure. (And because, well, if you're concerned about gate leakage, that is the spec!)
The 2N7000 is significantly worse than other MOSFETs. I don't know if that's because it's older, because its fab process is worse or was worse at one time, because it's easy to get those TO-92 legs into trouble, or just because of the die's low C_iss, but it's one fragile little bastard. The 2N7002 seems to be much better!
> Unprotected MOSFETs have nothing to do with "old" or "new".
Yes, they do, because the 2N7000 is older (1986) than integrated gate protection devices! Anything you see with them isn't a "true" 2N7000, even if it might meet the JEDEC spec sheet (which is rather hard to turn up...). Modern versions might have protection or might not (check the letters at the end of the part number... and hope you've got the right era of datasheet... and hope you've got the original MPN and don't have to read the condensed markings on the parts themselves... oh and hope you know the actual manufacturer!), but if they're older then they certainly won't have protection. So it kind of is an old (nope) versus new (maybe) thing.
> You can't just replace unprotected MOSFETs with protected ones and hope that your circuits work. You very well could be shorting out some circuit inadvertently.
Okay, technically, yes. In practice, no. Enhancement MOSFETs are usually used for power/switching applications, which won't care one damn bit about a silly diode, or in feedback loops for analog applications, which again won't care much. For various reasons, JFETs and depletion MOSFETs are usually preferred in analog-land, along of course with ICs. That's not to say you don't see discrete enhancement MOSFETs, but it's very, very uncommon. (And when I try to design that sort of stuff, I always seem to get stuck on not being able to find a FET without the pesky diodes built in. Sigh.)
August 2022 part. Unprotected MOSFET. Top-of-the-line, modern technology with 0.003 Ohms Rds, 157 Amps supported.
Protected vs unprotected has nothing to do with old or new. And yes, the specs on the 2N7000 suck, but who cares? It gets the job done and is the dirt-cheapest part. Beginners don't need performance, they just need lots of parts to play with, so cheapness probably takes priority.
> Also, manufacturers occasionally get sloppy about noting their existence
What are you talking about?
Any MOSFET with ESD-protection has a Human-body model (HBM) ESD specification. Probably in the realm of 2000V, or +/-1700V, depending on how the protection diode works.
TI btw makes a ton of ESD-protected MOSFETs with 4000V ESD and like 50nA of leakage. But they're much costlier, and of course surface-mount only because that's what pros use in practice. (Beginners definitely prefer through hole so that it works on breadboards, which is another reason to use 2N7000).
There is an IRL series. I just got some IRL540N's https://learnarduinonow.com/2017/06/02/logic-level-mosfets-i...
But I got arduinos to go with them because I doubt they will work directly from an esp. I think the big reason arduino can get away with charging so much is they must have some sort of educational institution market buying their products. The software and community support that comes with them is nice to have.
Yeah, Vgs(th) is 3V worst-case. That's the specification for 1mA of current flow Ids, which is near useless (note: the Arduino has traditionally been able to supply 20mA+, so a 1mA Ids current at 3V is completely pointless). "th" is Threshold after all, its not when the MOSFET is usable, its when it "starts to turn on".
Figure 2 on page 5 gives you an idea of the voltages you're supposed to use. Optimal usage of the 2N7000 requires 10V Vgs (for 1.5A or more), but 5V is sufficient for ~800mA bursts. And I expect 800mA to be enough for most beginner uses.
4V might be usable, but that's well beyond the capabilities of ESP32.
When I was a beginner, I wish someone would have handed me proper surface-mount parts and accompanying breakout boards that would turn them into TH components suitable for a breadboard.
"When it comes to hardware compatibility, pinout, voltage and form factor are unchanged from UNO R3, ensuring maximum hardware and electrical compatibility with existing shields and projects."
For me, Adafruit ate Arduino’s lunch. In terms of boards, form factor, price, ease of use, there is no comparison. That’s what confuses me about this board: why should I buy this vs any similar Adafruit board?
Is that true outside of the original board? I never see or hear about the newer arduino variants, to the point where I thought they semi-pivoted to become a more enterprise/industrial oriented offering. It might be selection biais, but it's not very hard to gauge "hobby" usage (youtubers, guides, subreddits, forums) and yet even the bluepill or esp32 are much more common in those circles than the newer arduino boards.
What's missing from this announcement for me is a comparison of current draw, sleep states, etc.
It's nice to get more powerful within a form factor and voltage and so on, and I realize many applications don't care about energy use, but increasingly the metric I care about with DIY/MCU gear (and my phone and my laptop is) "watt-for-watt performance increase".
With DIY stuff especially because I build battery-powered things here and there, and recharging once a year instead of once a month is a massive reduction in nuisance for stuff around the house. I dream of low power compute where I can consistently get away with solar or kinetic energy harvesting to reduce operational maintenance to 0!
I'm a bit lothe to admit it, but for beginners... anything under 50mA probably doesn't matter. So that includes Teensy Boards, RP2040, Arduino Uno, this new Arduino, etc. etc. A typical LED draws 20mA for example, while WiFi will draw 100mA or more. Ethernet also draws 100mA+.
So its very difficult for a beginner to "care" about anything below 50mA. Its just not something worth caring about, because everything else in your circuit uses so much more power.
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> With DIY stuff especially because I build battery-powered things here and there, and recharging once a year instead of once a month is a massive reduction in nuisance for stuff around the house. I dream of low power compute where I can consistently get away with solar or kinetic energy harvesting to reduce operational maintenance to 0!
Just search on UltraLowPower (ULP) microcontrollers, such as the STM32L5 (or the next version: STM32U5, whenever that comes out). Low-power microcontrollers are measured in "microamps per MHz".
That's 16uA / MHz active on the STM32U5. Though it fails at the lower end of things (~1mA or ~2mA is just the cost of the clock itself, so you can't drop below that in active mode. Sleep modes turn off the clock of course and allow the ~100nA to 500nA sleep modes on these ULP chips though).
STM32U5 isn't alone btw. There's plenty of competitors for this ultra-low power field.
The LEDs on these little development boards are typically big sources of current draw too. Like the main CPU can go into deep sleep sipping microamps of power, but the power and other LEDs sit there with a resistor pulling tens of milliamps all the time.
I know all of this of course (but nevertheless thanks for spreading useful information) :-)
What I'm saying is that I would really like this type of announcement to not take shape of absolute performance increase but at least include, if not focus, on performance-per-watt. I honestly don't agree with the "beginners won't care" - battery life is not a difficult concept and battery-powered projects are super common.
And I think it is on Arduino to do this, since the value they provide as a middle-man is to package this BOM up as a product and explain it and their product design choices.
As a sibling points out power efficiency can also vary with other component choices on the breakout board, e.g. the power delivery or included BMS. This is also something Arduino could optimize for and market as they productize. The MCU datasheet isn't everything.
20mA is an equivalent of a typical LED. And if that is too much for you to power a microcontroller you do what you do with a normal LED -- you do not power it all the time and instead you use it when it is needed and put to sleep when it is not.
So I fully agree with the parent comment that for an amateur once you got to this point, further improvements on power efficiency here is pretty much inconsequential. It is not like you are going to be building a watch or a sensor that will have to work for years on a single AAA.
A 20mA microcontroller will be sufficient for pretty much any project an amateur can think of, power usage wise.
"Putting it to sleep" is where a lot of details matter. Different MCUs don't have parity on what sleep states and options they offer and what they mean in practice. Often there are complex tables where certain wakeup schemes are only available in certain sleep states, and to extract minimum idle draw you need to know what you're doing.
The Arduino framework currently offers only minimal abstraction over this. If you use Arduino on an esp32, you have to reach into ESP-IDF API to dial in the details, e.g. set up ext1 wakeup and disable the RTC memory explicitly if you don't need it. Betting this is the same here at launch.
Arduino here is introducing two versions of the same product with widely different BOMs and not addressing this matter at all.
I think it'd be a great enhancement of their productization effort if they started explaining power envelope, showing improvements over time, standardized an API (derived from actual use cases) etc. This would add value over the raw chips and datasheets for their audience of beginners looking for ease of use. Without it this is just throwing some random new breakout boards with the same layouts over the fence - a very crowded market - and banking on ecosystem effects without evolving the ecosystem and tackling new aspects.
As an amateur EE I am looking at Arduino as an entry-level solution for people who want to learn a bit about electronics and have fun getting some results.
Arduino is supposed to be simple and it is a feature, not a bug.
If they start making it more and more complicated, it will just stop being simple and it will stop being what makes it so usable to complete noobs.
There is no shortage of options if you somehow find that Arduino is not powerful enough to you.
Well that's sorta the point - they're making it more complicated here (same name, two completely different BOMs with different behavior). An improvement would be to make power management and low-power projects beginner-friendly (e.g. by expanding the API framework) and a compelling announcement would be showing that off. For me it's still a curious omission.
Nah, two different BOMs isn't making it more complicated. In the end you hold a board in your hand and have to figure out how to get from it to what you want.
Or think in a different way: A board you have in your hand does not suddenly become more complicated because the company comes up with another board with different BOM. Maybe choosing the board becomes a bit more complicated, maybe choosing any addons for the boards becomes a bit more complicated (as you have to navigate compatibility), but using the board -- I don't think so.
Just from a glance at the microcontroller datasheets, it looks like the RA4M1's current draw in "Software Standby" mode is much lower than the older ATmega328P's "power down" mode (5μA vs. ~50μA).
But IIRC, the voltage regulators in previous Arduino boards already waste orders of magnitude more current than that, even while quiescent, making them not very suitable for battery-powered applications. So it remains to be seen if the R4 board improves on this.
One thing that's makes the product line a bit hard to reason about is that they have a Wifi and a non-Wifi version using two very different MCUs with very different power use characteristics. I.e. even if you have Wifi disabled on the Wifi version, it'll behave very differently from the non-Wifi board. People looking up numbers or experiences will have a harder time.
Add to this that afaict, the Arduino framework API currently doesn't provide fantastic abstractions for power/state management either. I had an Arduino-based esp32 project once and extracting best deep sleep performance definitely required reaching lower into ESP-IDF API instead (e.g. the difference between ext0 and ext1 wakeups and being able to shut off RTC memory in one but not the other).
That means with the current framework, you have to potentially write non-portable code between two different versions of the "same Uno R4" if you want to optimize for low power.
All of embedded is like this, really - scanning through and understanding a product line is basically a required skill - but meh, what a mess for beginners.
I could be wrong, but my reading of the post was that the Wi-Fi version has two MCUs - the main RA4M1, and the S3 WiFi module. So, if you turn off wi-fi, they should be effectively the same board.
I'd wager that 99% of Arduino enthusiasts (and a good percentage of industrial hw engineers...) do not have a habit of using power save modes on bare metal.
I agree, considering that much of their marketing surrounds DIY automation and they have this whole IoT cloud platform now, they very little support for low-power operation. In this regard I think Adafuit and Seeed platforms do much better, while still being very beginner friendly.
I found it strange that they are using a ARM Renesas chip instead of your more well known brands such as ST Micro, NXP or Microchip. Renesas was fairly late on using ARM cores compared to the rest of the industry.
Then I read the comment on CNX-Software. Renesas has invested 10 million dollar to Arduino. [1].
It’s their ARM chip that isn’t well known. The company itself is, kind of. Think of a Sukhoi civilian jet next to a line of fighter jets carrying both Su and MiG prefixes.
These boards confuse me so much. The microcontroller is a Renesas RA4M1 running at 48MHz. However, the Wifi version uses an Espressif S3 module. However the S3 is a dual core microcontroller that runs up to 240 MHz. Why not base the board on that, or perhaps even the RISC-V version of ESP32? ESP32 has plenty of pins, deep sleep, etc.
Is it only to keep pinout/5V compatibility with older Unos? I think their bigger problem is that there are a lot of good competitors now and their boards are severely overpriced for what they offer.
Exactly my thought, this seems like a bunch of design compromises mostly towards backwards-compatibility, but I suspect they also did not want to make their flagship product reliant on a chinese MCU, hence the no-wifi variant.
A low-power ARM MCU like that can run for years. There are wireless sensors based on TI's wireless ARM Cortex-M3 solutions that can run for years before needing a battery replacement.
if they weren't going to keep compatibility, there would be no point in going with the same form factor (and they could fix the awkward spacing that one of the headers has) - this is meant as something that will work with the various shields that are available.
I received an Arduino Uno starter kit from my grandfather manymany years ago on my birthday; it got me started coding before I even realized I was coding. I don't even think I was a teenager? Only years later when I took my first programming course at college, did I realize :)
Glad to see the original uno hardware updated -- I distinctly remember running out of flash memory, because I copied and pasted the blinking LED code hundreds and hundreds of times. I didn't know about for or while loops !
It looks like they haven't used "quattro" themselves, but a popular Arduino-based robotics project has, so using it for a new board would be confusing.
The Uno is one of the best boards for beginners due to its huge ecosystem of tutorials, accessories, etc. But for a long time the Uno was stuck on the same 8-bit core for backwards-compatibility reasons, even as alternative boards offered much better specs. If the R4 can offer better specs without fragmenting the ecosystem, it will be a winner for beginners IMO.
Don't know, but it certainly jumped out at me. All I could think of was that some part of the design isn't finalised and/or hiding part of it (or an identifying mark?) in an attempt to delay the counterfeiters.
I know a lot of people above don't think it means much, but I built a machine from scratch(for my business equipment) with no knowledge of any of this stuff using Arduino and it was one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever had.
There is something to be said about making hardware and software interface so easy like they have done. I would have never achieved this in the 3 month period as quickly as I did without Arduino. Super excited for this new Uno.
How popular are Arduinos nowadays? I've used them years ago and they were great, they taught me about how to program and use the ATMegas and generally how to program close to hardware.
But then the Raspberry Pis came along and showed me how useful more processing power is, and for the microcontroller stuff the ESP8266 and then the ESP32 showed me that having WiFi directly on the MCU is so much better than just an Arduino, for which I used to buy really long cables. There was a time when I then paired Arduinos with ESP8266 in order to integrate them into the network, but since the ESP32 I've never looked back.
And yet I see new Arduinos being offered and just wonder who is buying them nowadays. Since I haven't informed myself for years on them, maybe I'm really missing out on something?
Depends on what you're building. Raspberry Pi's are hard to obtain, much more expensive, overkill for tons of tasks, and involve learning or already knowing a bunch of linux / sysadmin knowledge.
In my experience, arduinos get picked over ESP32s mostly because someone's already done what you want with an arduino so you can leverage existing code/projects. Not every project needs wifi, or 240mhz, or 32bits. And in those cases, the beaten path is the best choice.
That said, yeah, esp32 gets picked a lot even when the wifi isn't needed, because it's starting to be the beaten path.
At first I thought it was really strange that they chose a slow Renesas MCU, while also including an ESP32 module.
Arduino has always been priced at an extreme premium which they justified by publishing easy-to-use software libraries, though.
Maybe it's good that we'll have a widely-supported hobby board that uses something besides Microchip/ST/Espressif. Maybe with a more diverse ecosystem, we could see a decent vendor-agnostic HAL someday.
> The board provides a CAN bus, which allows users to minimize wiring and execute different tasks in parallel by connecting multiple shields.
From [0]:
> The Renesas RA4M1 group of micrcontrollers (MCUs) uses the high-performance Arm® Cortex®-M4 core and offers a segment LCD controller and a capacitive touch sensing unit input for intensive HMI designs.
Maybe a CAN bus connector, or finally a builtin user interface, if it's not just a power circuit? Built-in LCD/OLED, buttons, basic shell casing and end-user usable expansion connectors are growing trends among China/Shenzhen originating platforms like M5Stack. Arduino is still relying on hacky solutions for UI, which might be less appealing for casual users.
For industrial stuff I tend to use the Parallax Propeller. It was ahead of its time when it came out, it still holds its own well (and the propeller 2 is a beast) and it can take a beating electrically.
Should I feel relieved that the main chip is not carrying scary prefixes and suffixes like CXD, APQ, uPD, MB, etc., or be absolutely horrified still that it’s a Renesas built ARM?
If you take a look at the Renesas website, you'll find that the product names look like this: "R7FA4M1AB3CFL#HA0". Renesas has a larger portfolio including, e.g., RISC-V chips. What's the problem?
I mean, what's the point? An ESP32 has 320K SRAM, 448K Flash and a 240 MHz dual core CPU. And it costs peanuts. That's the competition to beat, and this doesn't reach it, even though the ESP32 came out in 2016.
The Arduino has been resting on its laurels for too long, I'm afraid. There's long been things out there much faster and cheaper, and with wifi out there for a long time.
EDIT: And why not just use one of these, which is already for sale?
https://freematics.com/store/index.php?route=product/product...