Arduino Announces New Linux Boards in Collaborations with Intel and TI

http://makezine.com/2013/10/03/arduino-announces-two-new-linux-boards/

by emilepetrone • 13 years ago

115 36 13 years ago

sbierwagen• 13 years ago

No pricing? Pass.

You make the decision to pass on something before it's even available and all the information on it is released yet. Interesting...

jws• 13 years ago

Intel Galileo: "Pentium class" 32 bit Quark SoC X1000 with an Arduino header. November 29th.

TI Arduino TRE: 1-GHz Sitara AM335x processor plus an AVR processor for the Arduino side. Includes the Arduino sockets and it looks like an X-Bee socket. This looks like a Beaglebone combined with an Arduino. Ships sometime in Spring of 2014.

Of the two I find the TRE more interesting. Precise control of pins is difficult in Linux where you could be preempted and holding the CPU and counting cycles is frowned upon.

BTW: If anyone invents a time machine, please go back and get the original Arduino header alignment fixed.

joezydeco2• 13 years ago

If you need microsecond or nanosecond-level control of I/O, you're probably a little too advanced for an Arduino-type environment.

If you do, the AM335x offers a subsystem called the PRU that lets you program I/O that runs independently from the core. Kind of like, hmm, a bunch of Little Arduinos inside the Big Arduino.

http://www.ti.com/lit/wp/spry136a/spry136a.pdf

try-finally• 13 years ago

I use my arduino nano to drive 12 servos. This requires microsecond level accuracy. It can be done without too much trouble using the 16 bit clock.

jack123• 13 years ago

The thing is, the only tool provided for using the PRU is an assembler[1]. So trying to make an AM335x into an "Arduino" required at a minimum: a friendlier real-time IO system / PRU toolchain, the creation of an Arduino sketch and library API compatibility layer, and circuitry to deal with 5V IO.

Solving all that by just bolting an ATMega beside the AM335x isn't the least bit elegant, but Arduino has never seemed to be too bothered about elegance.

_1: https://github.com/beagleboard/am335x_pru_package

RamiK• 13 years ago

CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT

Oh, and Debian has a ready made one in the repositories so you don't even have to compile it yourself.

simias• 13 years ago

It seems the Galileo board controls GPIOs indirectly trough an I2C expander on a bus running @100kHz, so it'll be hard to do very precise control of the IOs even at the millisecond scale.

jack123• 13 years ago

BTW: If anyone invents a time machine, please go back and get the original Arduino header alignment fixed.

The TRE has all of the arduino signals on a 2x17 0.1" header, the one with a white background around it (which seems to mean 5v-safe / AVR-connected on the TRE). Then there's also the remaining double-row headers, which I'd assume are arranged on a 0.1" spacing in relation to each other, and are possibly a new Arduino standard for a 3.3V-only header layout.

It's still not perfect, though. Personally I wish they had made the new standard headers closer together than the old headers instead of further apart, to make it possible to at least bridge across some of them with a $10 5x5cm PCB (even the existing Arduino header standard is just a bit too large to fit on a 5x5cm board, and that's the standard lowest-price tier at all of the super cheap chinese PCB services). But I guess if you only need access to the Uno-era Arduino pins, you can now fit everything into a ~4.4cm long double header. But it's a double header, so you can't make your 'shield' able to pull double duty by plugging directly into a breadboard, which you could have if there had been two close rows of 5V headers instead of a single double-row.

But it is an improvement, and the form factor does have a history of working, a single double-row header is the basis for the entire Pi-Crust/Plate/Shield ecosystem.

High-resolution photos at http://e2e.ti.com/blogs_/b/toolsinsider/archive/2013/10/03/i...

pgeorgi• 13 years ago

The problem with Quark X1000 is that it has SMM - you don't have to worry about Linux messing up timing (it's the easily replaceable part), but the firmware.

codehero• 13 years ago

Since the days of the EspressoPC I have always been fascinated by small scale computers. With so many choices in small linux systems (Gumstix anyone?) I am not enchanted with seeing the Arduino name slapped on a Linux board. I was appalled at how digitalWrite was actually implemented, so I cannot imagine what kind of layers they put between the programmer and the metal.

antimagic• 13 years ago

Yup. There is no argument that modern systems are more flexible, but that flexibility comes at the cost of needing to understand a vastly more complex system.

I recently discovered an emulator online of my first 8-bit computer (the Compucolor II), and I was amazed at how simple it was to use (draw graphics to the screen, read from the keyboard or disk etc). Whilst you have to write all of the high-level processing yourself, the actual low-level magic is right there at your fingertips. Want to set a pin on the serial port - not a problem, the I/O is memory mapped, and the address you need is in a table in the 100 page manual that came with the computer. Done! Compare that with today's environments - find out the API needed to access a serial port pin (if it even exists!), pull in the system headers and libraries necessary (after figuring out which are used!), modify your build system to use them, and then run.

The beauty of Arduino is that it takes you back to that bare metal simplicity. It makes interfacing to the real world very easy. If you want to run a webserver it's probably not the best choice, but if you want to switch off your washing machine because a sensor has detected that a pool of water has formed on your kitchen floor, Arduino is so much more accessible for an amateur. I really don't understand where the manufacturers are going with these boards...

malandrew• 13 years ago

Good comment. Reminded me of something I'm really hoping to see come out of the arduino/raspberryPi/Beaglebone movement is a fresh look at a LISP machine. Given how cheap a computer is now, what's stopping the existence of a simarlarly size and priced Alpha-based chipset that can run OpenGenera or other LISP machine?

spongle• 13 years ago

Now the simple has been made incredibly complicated and it's virtually impossible to take a design based on these to production for the amateur!

andyjohnson02• 13 years ago

Seconded. I personally prefer the simplicity of the existing arduinos, but if someone needs one of these boards then why not use a raspberry pi or beaglebone that have mature ecosystems?

acadien• 13 years ago

I suspect these boards are being released in response to the rasberry pi, although I can't say for certain they're an appropriate replacement. Besides its not as if they're ending the old line of arduino boards, so if you don't like the new ones... just don't buy them :)

zhemao• 13 years ago

I'd guess that pin compatibility with existing Arduino shields is pretty important. Also, the TRE has both an AVR processor which can run the standard Arduino code as well as an ARM processor for running Linux. So you could use the AVR for low-latency polling of the GPIO pins while using the ARM for communicating over what looks like an ethernet port, four USB ports, two audio jacks, and an HDMI port.

frezik• 13 years ago

Raspberry Pi doesn't have enough pins for some projects. With a Linux system, neither one of them are suitable for real-time updates.

I'm working on a rover project that uses Raspberry Pi for WiFi and HD video processing, and Arduino for motor control. Best of both worlds. The TRE board sounds perfect if it can come in at a similar price point.

mhandley• 13 years ago

For quite a few systems I've built recently, I've used a Raspberry Pi connected to an Arduino Nano over USB. The Nano is the I/O expansion for the Pi. This combination is cheap (£35 total) and really flexible. Having them bundled would be useful sometimes, but equally often it's useful to have the small size of the nano located close to where I want the I/O and the larger Pi can be put elsewhere. So unless these boards are around the same price point, I'll give them a miss.

Dwolb• 13 years ago

Perhaps we could consider situations in which the original amateurs could be growing in knowledge and expertise.

gcb12• 13 years ago

nah. those will cost same/more than the already established beagle boards.

arduino will still be the popular cheap diy go to board. this is for projects that were impossible with the current one. so not making the original more complex, but tapping other markets

Buttons840• 13 years ago

Speaking of beagleboard -- why does beagleboard have a banner saying:

(image of beagle) + arduino = (image of new arduino board)

digikata• 13 years ago

Working on the recent expansion of embedded computing power has been like watching PCs develop all over again. Going from predominantly bare-metal software, to a mix of light RTOSs, and then full blown OSs. CPU Bit growth form 6 to 64. Peripheral speed and selection has grown too. That spectrum has always existed, but now that the industry focus isn't as strong on desktop CPUs, there's a vast current of progress being applied to the embedded side. The capabilities have grown to the point that I'm not even sure if embedded is the right long term name for this type of computing anymore.

gcb12• 13 years ago

maybe with TRE people will finally be able to something banal as those ambient backlight without having to buy chinese hdmi splitters!

DonGateley• 13 years ago

Indeed. Stereo audio in and out, assuming modern resolution and rates and sufficiently flexible ports (mic-in to line-in sensitivity and line-out to phone-out power), with plenty of horsepower for DSP and this aligns really nicely for audio projects. I've got all kinds of things I want to do with one.

ChikkaChiChi• 13 years ago

If Galileo is priced competitively to the BeagleBone we've got a whole new game on our hands.

Intel had released the Minnowboard (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/199-4-...) which seemed like a competitor to the Raspberry Pi, but at 200USD it wouldn't see nearly the uptake the more affordable systems have seen.

This reminds me of the Netbook arms race except the end product is infinitely more useful.

jack123• 13 years ago

Both the BeagleBone and the Minnowboard are made by the same company, CircuitCo. I'd say that the Arduino announcements today must have been a bit painful for them, except I'd guess they're probably also the partner company behind the TRE.

tesseractive• 13 years ago

This reminds me of the Netbook arms race except the end product is infinitely more useful.

Netbooks have tremendous utility to a subset of users. I have an old netbook with one of the slowest CPUs released in the past decade (Atom Z520), but it gets great battery life, and runs Emacs, Python, and a number of other tools I need like a champ.

Is that what most people want? No. But most people aren't microcontroller hardware hackers either.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Fascinating announcement. I love the boards, they have an interesting mix of hackability and programability. And they are clearly in response to the Raspberry Pi success (although much of that is the price point, RasPi type systems have been available for $200 - $300 each for a long time and don't get the traction of a $35 system :-)

I found the Arduino Yun [1] to be perhaps the most interesting board (nominally $52) which is a very inexpensive Linux setup with an Arduino adjacent. You can even load sketches over WiFi. Its interesting because you have a much more sophisticated computation engine acting as a glorified serial port for an 8 bit micro.

The parallels to the original microcomputer explosion cannot be over looked. The Altair 8800 was introduced as a "real computer" using chips designed for calculators and embedded systems which engineers could build and use much more cost effectively than the minicomputers available at the time. Here we have Arduinos which have an approachable level of complexity and a cost (< $50 seems to be the trigger point) which makes them useful in the education/hacking role.

On the specific announcements the TRE is the most interesting to me as I've got BeagleBone Black systems (one is running the Hue lights in my office) to Arduinoess and Pies and the "sweet spot" is definitely somewhere in the middle. Not enough pins on the Pi, not enough compute oomph in the Arduino. A number of things then are a blend of an Arduino and a larger system, so the TRE, the Yun fit that niche which the TRE being a more programmable on the Linux side version of the Yun.

[1] http://store.arduino.cc/ww/index.php?main_page=product_info&...

lhl• 13 years ago

I have an UDOO[1] Quad ($135) coming in very soon which is similar to the TRE - basically an SAM3X8E (Due) Arduino (w/ compatible headers) on a single board but combined w/ a much beefier i.MX6.

I have a Beaglebone Black and a Wandboard Quad sitting on my desk right now and I'm sure I'll end up grabbing the new Arduinos when they come out, although Spring 2014 is pretty far away and I suspect the UDOO will end up doing everything I want soon.

[1] http://www.udoo.org/

jlgaddis• 13 years ago

For those of you into the Arduino stuff, what are you making with these boards (the ones in the article, the Beagle* boards, even the Pi)? I've read a bunch of the "Build an 'x' with your RPi!" articles but I'm interested in hearing about some "real-world" things others have built.

Arduino Announces New Linux Boards in Collaborations with Intel and TI

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