$1 Microcontrollers (2017)

https://jaycarlson.net/microcontrollers/

by graderjs • 4 years ago

173 91 4 years ago

rmbyrro• 4 years ago

It's amazing that humanity can produce this sort of hardware under $1. This has implications that are more profound than previous industrial revolutions.

In centuries from now, our time will be studied as a remarkably revolutionary one.

baybal2• 4 years ago

In fact, even $1 microcontrollers are considered very expensive by industry standards.

Cheapest micros hovered around 10 cents mark before the semiconductor crisis.

Some Padauk micros go for single cents.

agumonkey• 4 years ago

10cents dual core 32 bits arch ?

supercucklchaim• 4 years ago

I find it amazing as well, now we can sleep at night knowing progress will potently progress.

pjmlp• 4 years ago

Given our love for destruction, and ongoing events, it will be talked about the same way as we talk about Babylon, Egypt, Sumerian, ancient Roman and Greece, Aztecs and Mayas.

4ggr0• 4 years ago

I would argue that this kind of price is only doable because people and resources are being exploited for it. Not specifically only for these microcontrollers, but most our consumer products in general.

In a worst case scenario, the resources for this $1 microcontroller were mined by an african child, barely earning anything. These resources are then shipped to China(probably), where people along the way don't earn much either. Except the white collar workers managing it all, of course.

These controllers are then built in a factory, either by robots, or low-earning workers. Then shipped to a warehouse.

For me, the fact that such things can be bought so cheaply is not really an achievement if we look at how broken the supply chains are if we consider the humans who are affected by them. And also the environment which gets destroyed quite a bit.

I am of course talking from a moralist and empathical perspective. What I am trying to say is, that this is only an achievement because we accept or ignore the drastic consequences.

asddubs• 4 years ago

Also environmental damage that will cost to repair, offloaded onto the government or even future generations

AussieWog932• 4 years ago

I am of course talking from a moralist and empathical perspective.

Speaking from a business and engineering perspective, I'd be surprised if (even in an ideal world with no environmental externalities or exploited third-world labourers) the cost of the raw resources, shipping and e-waste processing were a significant part of that $1.

We're literally talking about something 1/16 the size of a postage stamp that gets stamped into a similarly tiny plastic shell.

From my admittedly "peak mount stupid"[1] position as an engineer that uses these things, I'd suspect that the biggest contributors to that $1 figure come from the expert labour required to both R&D the chips as well as run the machines that manufacture them.

[1] http://theengineeringmanager.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/...

dtgriscom• 4 years ago

I share your concerns, but I doubt the materials are a major component of the cost of goods for these.

amelius4• 4 years ago

The first step in solving these problems is getting the accounting in place, so we know exactly who is paying what. It is beyond me why we are not even doing that.

Anyway, we could solve these problems if we doubled the price. And then it would still be an amazing achievement.

graderjs• 4 years ago

I'm sure there's truth to that. But I also think a large proportion of the price (and in general the plummeting price, and apogee-ing performance of many high tech components, such as batteries) is due not to exploitation, but to increases in efficiency. The bequeathed legacy of the thousand accreted technologies and improvements that have layered to produce contemporary supply chains.

Of course...everything we do today is based on exploitation: 1000s of years of exploitation of humans, frequently the worker and poorer classes' labor, 100s of years, and billions dead in war...all our achievements today literally stand atop this ginormous pile of blood and death...but, that ever-present historical reality aside...I think a large proportion of the skyrocketing perf and ocean-depth-plumbing prices of components is due to the compounding and intersecting effects of all our technological efficiencies.

throwaway815234• 4 years ago

This is a good article but it's a few years old, and out of date now. I can't see its date with my current adblock settings. It would be great if someone could find it and put it in the title.

There are stupendously powerful $1 microcontrollers now, including the RP2040 (dual core cortex m0+ with 264KB ram on the chip), ESP32-S2 (Espressif core with 400k of ram and wifi), and ESP32-C3 with wifi and RISC-V core and again something like 400k of ram.

Jay Carlson also has a series about microcontrollers as cheap as THREE CENTS, i.e. the famous Padauk 3 cent MCU:

https://jaycarlson.net/2019/09/06/whats-up-with-these-3-cent...

genezeta• 4 years ago

It would be great if someone could find it and put it in the title.

There's no publication date -nor anything marking it as updated at any time afterwards- on the article itself, but first comments are from November 2017 and passing references in the article point to "end of 2017" too.

coupdejarnac2• 4 years ago

Those are the three micros I use for projects/products, too. A while back I bought a few hundred of the Padauk chips with the intent of doing a small manufacturing run of a side project, but I haven't seen them in stock at the normal places for a while. It looks like the lead time for cheap micros in general is about a year.

nanis• 4 years ago

    <script type='application/ld+json' class='yoast-schema-graph
     ... 
    "datePublished":"2017-07-17T01:31:05-05:00",
    "dateModified":"2017-11-18T18:07:56-06:00"}]}

AussieWog932• 4 years ago

RP2040

Wow, that's an incredibly capable chip for the price!

amelius4• 4 years ago

How fast is the serial interface over USB? (What you need if you want to connect it to a normal PC)

jhallenworld• 4 years ago

It has an interesting trade-off: no internal flash. But I've found that I add a SPI-flash chip to the MCU in many designs, so it's a reasonable choice.

NXP has rt1020 (Cortex-M7, no flash), or rt1024, which is same but 4 MB flash in the package- it's connected to the SPI-flash controller of the rt1020 core, so I think it's a multi-die package.

throwaway815234• 4 years ago

Look at the even more capable and comparably priced ESP32-S2 and ESP32-C3.

pb82• 4 years ago

The article about the Padauk is interesting. Especially the description of the FPPA feature. Multiple CPU contexts? This sounds suspiciously like SMT to me which would be a total novelty for a micro controller (afaik).

sokoloff• 4 years ago

ESP32 was released August 2016. I’m not even sure it was the first.

rajnathani• 4 years ago

(2017)

amelius4• 4 years ago

The Chinese company Espressif Systems is doing really well in this area, with its ESP32 series.

4gotunameagain• 4 years ago

ESPs are great value for money, but they are all kinda hodgepodge and the datasheets / documentation / frameworks are not the best.

You get what you pay for I guess :)

hahamrfunnyguy• 4 years ago

The Texas Instruments MSP430 is another good one to look at. At one point, dev kits were available for under $10. It's a good choice for low-power applications. Comes with a free IDE.

sgt3• 4 years ago

I have a few MSP430's, mostly the really lower end ones and I have recently been wondering if it's really worth it for a hobbyist.

The ESP's have low power modes as well, and can run off a tiny battery, which was the primary strength of MSP.

Any thoughts? I like the MSP ecosystem and docs, but ESP also shines there.

lpmay3• 4 years ago

It's up to hobbyists what's worth it to them, but the power consumption of the ESP 8266/32 is not _really_ comparable to the '430. "Deep sleep" mode on the ESP seems to be about 20uA, an MSP430FR5969 can go to a 20nA LPM 4.5 mode (factor of 1000 lower). Harder to compare in a HN comment, but active mode power consumption is also in the MSP's favor for many applications particularly when using the built in hardware accelerators like LEA.

Of course the MSP430 doesn't have a WiFi modem or a giant hobbyist community like the ESP, so I'm really not trying to make an argument for which is "better" just trying to add some contrast to the low power features you asked about.

auxym3• 4 years ago

TBH the rpi pico (rp2040 dev board) is hard to beat for the price of 5$. Dual core ARM cortex-m0+ at 100 something MHz and loads of ram and flash.

makapuf• 4 years ago

Dont forget programmable io ports with their independent tiny cores.

GeorgeTirebiter6• 4 years ago

I have been struggling to get TI's (free) Code Composer Studio to recognize my MSP430FR2311 boards now on-and-off for months. They 'upgrade' the code, and then I can't program my devices. In fact, so far, I've spent more time trying to get the dev environment to work than developing my code. Not Fun.

Very cool when it does work, tho. I'd prefer to pay a little more for parts and get some English-based support.

I'll work through the Code Disposer Studio issues...again...

GeorgeTirebiter6• 4 years ago

It helps if the USB cable one is using actually provides more than just Power and Ground. (red-faced blushing....)

I take back all the mud about CCS; except of course now it wants to put a new bootloader on one of the boards, but seems unable to do that. Good thing the other board is fine.

fouc2• 4 years ago

Maybe this is a dumb question, but are any of these cheap microcontrollers able to run Win 98? Or am I misunderstanding what microcontrollers can do?

detaro• 4 years ago

None have a PC-architecture (x86+other HW standards), so no, they aren't. It would be possible to make a microcontroller that can, but nobody does. Intel did make a few experiments with x86 microcontrollers, but even those were afaik not PC-like enough, because you generally don't want a lot of those things in a microcontroller.

zozbot234• 4 years ago

There are some recent x86 SoC's which basically implement i586 and have been made to run both MS-DOG and Windows 9x. Commonly used by retro- and vintage computing hobbyists. None that would cost $1, though.

hungryforcodes• 4 years ago

https://hackaday.com/2021/07/28/emulating-the-ibm-pc-on-an-e...

R0b0t13• 4 years ago

Generally a microcontroller has no MMU. A microprocessor may mean the same thing. The industry term for something with an MMU is an application processor (Cortex-A). There are other terms that can be used, but it will need to be specified.

There is some fuzzy area between MMU-less, small processors, and processors with no MMU but large enough to run Linux in a MMU-less way.

fouc2• 4 years ago

Interesting! Any idea how hard is it to include an MMU? Or better yet, what's the cheapest application processor?

ivoras• 4 years ago

Things called "microcontrollers" usually have these properties:

* They are actually CPUs, but with very weak feature sets related to desktop & scientific computing

* They may or may not have hardware to do any kind of advanced computation, starting with plain old multiplication and division of integers (addition and subtraction of integers is enough for what they do). Yes you read this correctly. The vast majority of 8-bit microcontrollers cannot even do division or even multiplication in hardware.

* They run with clocks from kilohertz to low megahertz

* They might be 8-bit, 16-bit or 32-bit, with rarity going up as the bitness goes up. There's a ton of 8-bit microntrollers, and 32-bit are much rarer. 64-bit ones are very very rare, since if you need that processing width, you might as well go for a single-board-computer like a Raspberry Pi.

* They are used to DIRECTLY drive other hardware, not in an abstract way. They literally regulate voltages on their pins to make stuff happen with connected hardware.

* They might have RAM space ranging from a couple of BYTES (yes, BYTES, see e.g. this one having 32 bytes of RAM: https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/ATTINY9#) to a couple of hundreds of kilobytes. It's very rare to have a microcontroller with a megabyte or more of RAM, because, as before, in that case you might as well just use a full-featured desktop-ish CPU.

* They are usually lacking a special bit of hardware called a MMU (Memory Management Unit) which is used by "real" operating systems like Linux and Windows to manage process isolation and many other useful things related to memory. If you need a MMU, again, just use a SBC.

So where do we use microcontrollers? Well, what do you think happens in your garage or car keyfob when you click on the buttons? What tells your microwave when to finish and with which power level to nuke your food? What drives your electric toothbrush? Your car's gas valves? Microcontrollers, that's what.

They are currently (or have been a few years ago) so cheap we can readily add a microcontroller to every toilet paper leaf, and it would only bring the price of a roll up by a dollar or so. What's stopping us to do just that is the sorry state of current batteries and energy harvesting in general - those technologies simply are not as developed (yet).

So, no, you wouldn't describe a chip which can run Windows 98 as a "microcontroller".

mopsi• 4 years ago

EEVblog had a video series about a 3 cent microcontroller: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=3+cent+microcon...

not_the_fda2• 4 years ago

I don't think any of these are in stock. Whole industry kept moving to higher cost parts as parts vanished.

waschl3• 4 years ago

Semi-related: Since few months I am digging into tinkering and electronics. It’s really great to learn about modern era solutions which enable cool projects with low entry barrier.

However, I happen to learn about new solutions (new sensors, actors, boards, ICs) more randomly than systematically. I tried to google for databases, blogs or news outlets, but couldn’t find anything suited for my consumerish needs. Going through hundreds of pages for similar products on online shops also didn’t yield any good output. Do you guys know any such source? How do you keep yourself updated on interesting new products on the market?

HeyLaughingBoy• 4 years ago

Usually if you have accounts at the major distributors(Arrow, Digi-Key, Newark, etc.), you'll get occasional updates passed on from some of the manufacturers whose parts they sell. But those are typically not the hobbyist/consumer items you may be looking for.

Perhaps sign up for a SparkFun account? I get a lot of OSHW and new module information from them.

waschl3• 4 years ago

Thanks,will try!

iudqnolq2• 4 years ago

(total noob) I like looking at the components adadruit builds in-house. For most of them they have open-sourced the schematics, and you can then look up the building blocks on sites like DigiKey.

waschl3• 4 years ago

Yeah Adafruit is a good source! However one supplier of potentially many

amelius4• 4 years ago

What I want more than $1 microcontrollers is a series of controllers that goes from low price/low performance to higher price/higher performance, but all programmable with the same open-source software stack.

I don't want to read datasheets again whenever I need 100MHz more clock speed, or 1mW less power consumption. Because reading datasheets, at some point, feels like filling out tax forms.

not_the_fda2• 4 years ago

The STM32 line is as close as you will get with this. Its HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) is MIT licensed and is very similar across products. Products in the same family are nearly pin compatible.

timpattinson• 4 years ago

Yeah, STM32 spans the range between the $1 and the STM32F7 at 200Mhz

mmoskal• 4 years ago

They are remarkably similar even at the register level - when you program with the LL (low level) library that essentially exposes hardware registers. I find LL easier to understand and work with than HAL.

BTW the license is mostly BSD not MIT with some additional libraries more restrictive.

bloopernova• 4 years ago

I've wanted something similar when shopping at Adafruit. https://www.pcpartpicker.com has some pretty good search tools that I wish more vendors would copy.

auxym3• 4 years ago

Digikey's parametric search is hard to beat.

drewzero12• 4 years ago

I just came across this site on Friday when looking for a possible replacement for some Digispark (ATTiny85 board) clones at work to connect to some 5v relay modules. I'm not too invested in the Arduino ecosystem at this point and am still looking into other options, haven't finished reading through the whole list yet.

cf141q53252• 4 years ago

I just used some attiny85 as a software based USB interface with v-usb for interfacing with an atmega328p. I especially love the DIP size, its amazing that i could solder the entire thing learning about capacitors and pull up resistors in the process. The use of multiple processors also allowed for some security by design, having functionalities capsuled with strictly defined directions of communication.

I think the ecosystem is really quite impressive with a really low entry hurdle from a teaching perspective. It was possible to get the power consumption of the atmega328p low enough for battery operation even with just Arduino, giving an easy introduction into prescalers and flags. From there you can step deeper into the functionality of avrdude (shoutout to USBASP) and standard AVR makefile projects with for example the micronucleus bootloader.

drewzero12• 4 years ago

I should've specified that I don't dislike the ATTiny85 or Arduino, far from it. I just needed to find a replacement for a Digispark that I bricked (flashed the wrong bootloader) and wanted to see what other options were out there for a low-spec, low-cost MCU/dev board. I've been using Arduino for years and it's hard to beat the docs and community.

voakbasda• 4 years ago

I stopped tinkering with electronics despite being a full-time embedded software engineer. I have designed small boards, but I only know enough EE to get myself in trouble. I prefer working with EEs that know their stuff, where our skills can compliment each others’.

I no longer work on “hobby” projects; such things become an albatross around my neck. If you deploy a hobby project in your life, you must maintain it. Forever. For that time cost, I want to work on a product that could go into production and pay for its own maintenance.

Unfortunately, I cannot stand being around people anymore. I had my entire life savings stolen by an ex, with the government’s help. When I tried to open back up and make new friends after that shit show was over, I was drugged and raped by the first guy that I invited into my house in over two years; he was never even arrested for what he did. And after over 25 years, I stopped playing music, because those “friends” all actively abandoned me when I decided to start carrying a sidearm daily. Collectively, these events destroyed my belief in the just rule of law and the goodness of humanity.

Overall, the above factors make me read articles like this with a mixture of excitement and possibility combined with depression and hopelessness. I do not have the resources for a side project, financially or emotionally. I cannot design and launch a side project, even though I am fully capable and that is what I most want to do.

0_____0• 4 years ago

Sounds like you've had a series of incredibly traumatic experiences. I'm sorry to hear that, and I hope that you're able to find your way into friendships and relationships that allow you to trust again.

monkmartinez• 4 years ago

Wow... Please, please talk to your PCP about these events and feelings. If you want help sorting through this, may I suggest; https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/cognitive-beha...

oxplot2• 4 years ago

If you deploy a hobby project in your life, you must maintain it. Forever.

Perhaps your definition of hobby is different to mine, but hobby projects are exactly the kind you can abandon in a heartbeat. No long term customers, no guarantees, no obligations. In fact, we hear about countless HW and SW projects being abandoned left and right, right here on HN on regular basis.

For that time cost, I want to work on a product that could go into production and pay for its own maintenance.

Hobby and high volume production aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

I wanted to build a custom board to use USB-C power in my projects. Except the cost of a dozen boards assembled was quite high. So I made a thousand or so to subsidize the cost of development and production for myself. The chip I used went out stock (global chip shortage related) but until it did, my "hobby" project paid for itself and actually made me a small profit as well.

gmassman• 4 years ago

I'm sorry to hear about your loss of faith in humanity. Especially hearing how you don't play music with others anymore. I'm a musician and not being able to make music with my friends would be a huge loss.

I hope you find peace and healing. People often suck, but they can also be beautiful if given the chance. And you deserve that chance.

yjftsjthsd-h• 4 years ago

I no longer work on “hobby” projects; such things become an albatross around my neck. If you deploy a hobby project in your life, you must maintain it. Forever.

Alternatively: If you do something yourself, you get the option to be able to maintain it forever. If you buy something, the vendor will probably stop caring the moment the sale completes; any maintenance you want to do yourself becomes a reverse engineering effort as your work into a system that you didn't design.

randrews• 4 years ago

You don't mention where you live, but that last one suggests to me that you might consider moving to a different part of the country: I know several people, including myself, who carry sidearms. Where I live, everyone can do it, some people do do it, but no one gets upset by it or cares that much.

oxplot2• 4 years ago

Be careful spending time writing software/firmware for chips that may disappear tomorrow. Cost of the chip itself isn't everything, in fact it's one of the least important things if you're looking at long term cost. This is especially relevant in the current chip shortage climate which has made this point quite salient.

Whether it's a hobby project or a high volume production project, you don't want hundreds of hours of your time spent developing for it to go down the drain. In case of a hobby project, it probably means the one or two units you made are all that you're ever going to make. In case of a product you built in high volumes, it means a large gap in sales and lost revenue while you re-do the firmware for a new chip.

R0b0t13• 4 years ago

This is a real concern. A lot of these offerings are not useful now because they are not ARM (or, soon, RISC-V). Even with instruction set match, moving between vendors is a huge issue.

ChuckMcM• 4 years ago

Read this when it came out, it helped me to understand that with modern silicon geometries or process nodes, computers are "free". The largest part of the cost here is the packaging and testing of individual parts.

dvh• 4 years ago

What's the cheapest way to get:

44kHz ADC > FFT > some light computation (e.g. 1000 multiplications) > IFFT > DAC

sitkack2• 4 years ago

Cheapest on what axis?

Qty 1, including your time, a raspberry pi zero.

Qty 1000, not including your time, an FPGA with embedded multipliers.

coupdejarnac2• 4 years ago

Probably a TI C2000 digital signal controller, though I am out of touch with that market segment these days.

vegadw• 4 years ago

The author, Jay Carlson, is a really rad guy. I've got a few stereoscopic camera boards of his floating around that I happened to run into and a few emails later I had them up and running!

deepsquirrelnet• 4 years ago

I've used a lot of micros as a hobbyist, and many on this list. For my time and money, I like the PSOC, even though the author pretty much dismisses them.

PSOC always seems to be what I need. I've used it to read CCDs (timing is very strict, and works much better on the SOC than in software). I've made capacitive soil moisture sensors using the capsense. The psoc5 has good options for USB devices.

But I don't make things to mass produce, so $1 has no appeal to me. $10 dev board is fine for me, if it does what I need it to do. There's a lot to love about the PSOC, but if you ignore all of the things they do that these other microcontrollers don't do, it might not look great by comparison. Also they have a development environment that is free and easy enough to learn that it doesn't require living in datasheets.

$1 Microcontrollers (2017)

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