What Comes After Arduino?

Arduino is a great microncontroller package for entry-level electronics tinkerers, but once you've got your sea legs, cheaper DIY microcontrollers used to build anything from grow-lights to irrigation systems are what you might reach for next

By Mikey Sklar Posted 09.25.2009 at 2:55 pm 13 Comments

Arduino Duemilanove: Adafruit Industries

The Arduino platform is doing something amazing: bringing hardware development to the masses. It's a sweet little system, with a built-in hardware programmer, simplified programming language, and lively user base that offers plenty of sample code and assistance in the online forums. While this fully assembled solution is a good way to get your feet wet, there are a lot of good reasons to just buy an off-the-shelf processor, make your own circuit board and write in a low level language like C. It can be cheaper, quicker and easier to debug. Here, check out some of the projects I've made and how I pay for my hobby, as well as my hardware setup.

Evil Mad Science Menorah on a Chip: Evil Mad Science Shop

What Do the Pros Use?

I'm not the only one who knows there are times to leave Arduino behind. Adafruit Industries and Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories are arguably the leaders of the DIY electronics revolution. Look closely at their products and you will often find a humble AVR micocontroller instead a full-blown Arduino. I personally love a business card on which you can mount a microcontroller and start developing firmware. You are doing something right when you can sell your business card for $4.75. Adafruit sells an inexpensive persistence of vision kit for bike wheels that allows a single row of LEDs to show images or spell out text. Using Arduino for such a project would be overkill. Here are the two scenarios in which I reach for an AVR rather than an Arduino.

Spoke POV Microcontroller based Persistence of Vision: Adafruit Industries

To Save Money, Make Money

Arduinos generally go for $15 to $60 each. This is affordable for one-off tinkering, but it doesn't scale well. I've built 10-unit runs of simple projects using raw microcontrollers and custom circuit boards for 90 percent less than the price of a single Arduino. Among them are a temperature display for my veggie powered car, intelligent irrigation controllers for the yard, even grow lights for plants that pulse LEDs.

Super Efficient LED Growlight: Mikey Sklar

These projects are also physically smaller than most Arduinos. By shrinking the design and keeping costs low, it's easier to sell your homemade invention and turn a profit. I've actually been able to pay for my electronics habit by building a few extra units and selling them online.

For Easy Debugging

Most Arduino users debug their code by sprinkling print statements into the code then watching the output in a serial terminal. This is an effective way to find out where the software is misbehaving, but it's time consuming. Professional hardware developers use in-circuit emulators (ICE), which allow the user to see the values of each variable and step through the code with a debugger as it executes on the processor. These ICE-based systems massively speed up hardware development time.

My Setup:

hardware programmer (Sparkfun $50.95)
breakout board (atmega128) (Sparkfun $3.95)
Microcontroller: atmega169pv (Digikey $3.81 [qty => 25])

This hardware programmer has ICE capability and uses the AVR JTAG MK-I protocol. In layman's terms, that means I can program old AVR chips with a 10-pin connector and debug over the same connection. No need to set up an additional serial connection and litter the code with print statements to see what's going on. Once the code is written and the sensors/actuators are working properly, I design a circuit board and order custom printing for at least 10 boards. I can typically develop and build a new item to sell online in less than a week.

Tell me about your development setup in the comments.

AVR based hardware development: Mikey Sklar

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13 Comments

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amnite

09/27/09 at 2:10 am

OK... I go to the Adafruit site often and have contemplated buying a couple of their kits for my own personal fun factor. But I have always wanted to understand how circuitry and the likes work from the ground up. I'm too busy too go back to school and learn this, and I haven't found much help on the internet. Maybe I've overlooked something but if you have any recommendations for electronics and circuitry(for dummies basically[and don't recommend the book if it exists]), I know I could turn that information into a fun pastime and with my computer background I can think of plenty of things I want to do...
*~amnite~*

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yetihehe

09/27/09 at 5:19 pm

I recommend you "The art of electronics" book. It's really big (over 1k pages) but very in-depth. THE best way is just to find some local hobbyist and ask him about those parts which you just cannot understand. I'm now in the same position as you. With computer background some things are just harder (I've burned one at89s2051 yesterday because of one misunderstanding, too silly to explain) because some concepts are inappropriate in electronics.

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Mikey Sklar

09/27/09 at 8:00 pm

The art of electronics is a amazing book, but I have to disagree about it being a "for dummies" sort of read. That book dives deeply into theory and will put you to sleep by page 27. It is good for reference, but you can start at more DIY level with a book like Forrest M. Mim's: "Getting Started with Electronics".

http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=3433933

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NeoTechni

10/16/09 at 5:05 am

I program a PSP.

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NeoTechni

10/16/09 at 5:05 am

Oh, and UMPCs

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.im.gettin.rich...

01/10/10 at 11:36 am

This is pretty cool..., i want one..., i just need a good deal, anyone know where to get the good deals?

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tabest

01/26/10 at 6:18 pm

I think that you could get a good read by some very simple yet cool projects, which show how to do some of the very basics. Like your grow light for example, It is fairly simple with LED's, but I bet you have a processor in there just for the fun of it? I've got the computer background, and the electrical background, and I'm currently going to school to learn the hardware development. And you are NEVER too old to go to school. You should definitely go when you are older, then you are already set, can go part time, take a course, maybe two, and focus on it. Electronics is definitely the way of the future, so please, everyone out there reading this, take a class, or buy a book, but please do learn, this stuff is fun!

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pencari

06/26/10 at 10:05 pm

The beauty of these blogging engines and CMS platforms is the lack of limitations and ease of manipulation that allows developers to implement rich content and 'skin' the site in such a way that with very little effort one would never notice what it is making the site tick all without limiting content and effectiveness.

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catto

11/25/10 at 10:59 am

amnite: I say go for the Adafruit kits just to get started. Maybe even experiment with a Arduino. While I think it is important to create a understanding of electronics from the ground up it is not necessary to start with a advanced setup that I am promoting in this story.
www.promdresspicture.com
The art of electronics is a amazing book, but I have to disagree about it being a "for dummies" sort of read. That book dives deeply into theory and will put you to sleep by page 27. It is good for reference, but you can start at more DIY level with a book like Forrest M. Mim's: "Getting Started with Electronics".

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susie88

12/06/10 at 10:22 pm

La beauté de ces moteurs de blogs et plates-formes CMS est l'absence de limites et la facilité de manipulation qui permet aux développeurs de mettre en œuvre un contenu riche et «peau» du site de telle manière que, avec très peu d'effort on ne remarque jamais ce qu'elle est de rendre le site cocher toutes les cases sans limiter le contenu et l'efficacité.

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generalSocial

08/07/11 at 12:03 pm

Thanks for the great article on Arduino. I'm really getting into it and find that the lack of program trace and other tools I'm accustomed to as a programmer are not there.

If I want to debug my arduino using trace, what to get and how to do it?

Can anybody help with this?

I'm even prepared to used something that's not an arduino to get this feature.

Any information on this would be appreciated.

I've got lots of projects going but the one I'm working on his this drawbot: mambohead.com/category/drawbot-2/ .

I'm finding that I'm loosing a bit of time to using print statements to figure out whats going on.

Darcy Whyte

Inspirational Flying Machines:
www.rubber-power.com

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Visual Micro

05/25/12 at 10:56 am

There is an Arduino trace and break debugging tool being released in June 2012 for the free Arduino plugin for Visual Studio.

The tool can also provide Arduino debugging services over xbee radio which is a useful feature not available to other micro processors.

The Arduino debugging tool removes the need to hack code with debug statements and conditions which makes life a lot easier for many Arduino programmers.

We are looking for a few beta testers, if interested please use the contact page on www.visualmicro.com.

This is a link to the first page of documentation for the tool. You will see at the top of the page there are 15 other articles specifically related to Arduino debugging

www.visualmicro.com/post/2012/02/16/Arduno-Debugger-Preview.aspx

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sspence65

01/10/13 at 3:34 pm

After Arduino? A DIY Arduino compatible based on a $3 atmel 328P with bootloader, a crystal, and 4 capacitors. Learn how to build your own projects with free code, schematics and video at

http://arduinotronics.blogspot.com