17 Apr
2012
17 Apr
'12
7:28 p.m.
On 4/17/2012 10:00 AM, David Riley wrote:
To be clear, I don't dislike the Arduino, not at
all. It's great at
what it does, just like a PET. I just don't like when people get the
idea to shoehorn it into something it's totally inappropriate for,
which is something I *do* see a lot (much like Mouse's example where a
simple 555 circuit would have made much more sense).
Not trying to pick a fight,
but I will respectfully disagree. I suspect
we all have been working on a job, needed a specific tool we did not
possess, and decided to repurpose another tool wholly inappropriate for
the task to accomplish the goal. Why? Because the job needed done and
we decided that the goal was the job, not the perfect use of a tool.
Sure, we could go buy the right tool, but we didn't.
We probably don't do it often, but I think the only people that can
safely complain over the use of a arduino instead of a 555 are those who
have never in their lives used a tool in anything but its preferred
domain. I suspect that list of people is suitably small.
Mind you, I cringe a bit when I see someone using a MEGA32 instead of a
555 or a set of logic gates, but then I remember that the IC is not
their goal, the output or the thing being cycled/timed/on shotted, etc.
is the goal. Kudos to them for finding a way to get to the goal as
quickly as possible. While I whine about misuse of tooling, they are
creating/innovation/learning.
I'll also admit the arduino bothered me, someone who built their own
parallel port AVR programmer, created projects from scratch with the
avr-gcc toolchain, installed and configured avrdude to do the
programming, and wired up my own AVR on perfboard. However, at some
point, I started to smile that arduino had created a huge market for
AVR-compatible items, and it had raised the visibility of the AVR. I
was glad, because for the longest time, PIC sat on top of the hobby
community, and Parallax's BASIC Stamp and stuff like that reigned. As
someone who compared the PIC to the AVR 8 bit line and found the PIC
lagging significantly in many areas except part options and price, I was
glad the better architecture found a chance to shine.
On 4/17/2012 7:42 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
I have a little Duemilanove here. I'm used to 'bare metal' PIC18
coding. Since you probably know: what's the quickest route to that on
the Arduino, given that my host is OS X/PPC... I was a little
disturbed by the "just press play" IDE.
Get an AVR programmer (AVR ISP Mk II is a good choice, lots of cheap
clones if you're not Win7 64 bit. Don't try a clone on Win7 64 bit,
trust me, lots of pain and frustration)
Grab a copy of WinAVR off the net.
get avrdude running and attach a programming port to the Arduino clone
(pins are described in the datasheet for the AVR on the board)
Feel free to ask folks like myself for help.
Jim