A $5 Arduino?!!

[Anonymous Remailer (austria)]

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/i...expensive-full-sized-arduino-derivative-board

At first I was presently surprised but after a while I started to
wonder. Knowing that the cheapest AVR device costs about $3-$5 I started
to investigate how they could build a complete board with
MPU for $5 including shipping. It turns out the Chinese have CLONED the
Atmel AVR processor with an instruction set compatible creation of their
own. It runs most AVR code unaltered save for the fact that some
of the peripherals are slightly less capable and the device used in the
board only has 1K RAM and 8K flash.

Still it's a very nice entry level board for simple systems. I estimate
that you can fit a program of about 1000 lines of C code into the 8K
flash, which is sufficient for a lot of projects.

 

[dp]

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/i...expensive-full-sized-arduino-derivative-board

At first I was presently surprised but after a while I started to
wonder. Knowing that the cheapest AVR device costs about $3-$5 I started
to investigate how they could build a complete board with
MPU for $5 including shipping. It turns out the Chinese have CLONED the
Atmel AVR processor with an instruction set compatible creation of their
own. It runs most AVR code unaltered save for the fact that some
of the peripherals are slightly less capable and the device used in the
board only has 1K RAM and 8K flash.

Still it's a very nice entry level board for simple systems. I estimate
that you can fit a program of about 1000 lines of C code into the 8K
flash, which is sufficient for a lot of projects.

Nice toy, may be.
Entry level - not so sure, entry into what - cut and paste?

Whether it costs $5 or $50 or is given away for free makes
no significant difference I suppose. If someones invested
time into it will be at a similar cost then someone might
as well just watch some TV show instead.

But I have never used an evaluation board in my life (I never
saw any reason why I should do the same project twice)
so may be I am missing the whole point of that sort of boards.

Dimiter

 

[dp]

Tying a control computer to a piece of peripheral hardware?


Drunk much?

You are all diverse and stuff... not.


They are for controlling lab experiments, and a host of other things
apparently far above your aptitude level. Obviously.

At least the cubox can be used as a little PC.

Whatever you say, dear, whatever you say.
I have yet to encounter anyone using that sort of thing get past
the wannabe stage.

Dimiter