“Trinket Pro”: $10 ATmega328P board from Adafruit
As you know, @Daniel_Garcia and I (somehow) added support for the Adafruit ATtiny-based Trinket and Gemma boards to FastLED, cursing at the ATtiny chip the whole way. Well, it looks like the smart folks at Adafruit were also itching for a full ATmega chip in the Trinket-class form factor, and they built one:
They’ve still pulled some tricks to enable a USB interface using just bootloader software instead of a dedicated USB/FTDI chip, so there may yet be some quirks here, BUT it looks like “99%” of sketches that run on an Uno will run on the Trinket Pro.
More details:
you MUST press the reset button to load new code (same as the small Trinket)
the Serial Monitor doesn’t work over USB (only over FTDI, cable not included)
5V version is 16MHz, 3V version is 12MHz
power regulator can only deliver 150mA (5 pixels?)
maximum sketch size is a bit smaller than most '328 boards: 28,672 bytes
pins 2 and 7 hardwired for USB use
Me, I still like the DFRobot Beetle and the Arduino Nano for small form factor ATmega-based boards around/under $10 with onboard USB support. (And once we get up to $20, there’s the ARM-based Teensy 3.1…)
Assuming FastLED is in the 99% of code that runs just like on an Uno, this might be a nice cheap little embedded board for people to use, before they’re ready to start doing the whole “order random parts from China/AliExpress/eBay” thing.
I think the need to press the button every time you reflash your code makes this less appealing for me. Also, since it’s not “real” USB, the Serial Monitor window in the IDE doesn’t work. For me, the $8 Beetle still wins this round-- even though it loses points for (1) NO reset button, and (2) no voltage regulator.
And I also only typically need a pin or three, and no shields, so these small boards are great.
Somewhere someone is building a tiny little Bluetooth/BLE-enabled ARM Cortex M0+ board which will retail for $cheap. At least I hope they are.
The STM32 has a kind of shitty GPIO architecture, it wouldn’t be my first choice for FastLED (though I will get support in for it shortly!) (see next comment, rfduino doesn’t use STM32)
I already have a trinket pro on order, and I suspect the library will mostly just work with it. The 12Mhz boards are backordered, but I should be able to make those work pretty easily.
I don’t think Adafruit cares whose libraries are used - there are a lot of things that FastLED does that their libraries don’t do.
I am also hard press to give up my Beetle over the Trinket Pro Also. I basically only use about 4-5 pins currently. So having 18 pins isn’t needed for what I use my arduino for.
I’d go further: I think they like that there are multiple libraries that help them sell more hardware and make it more useful for more people.
I’ve spoke with Becky Stern a couple of times and it seems to me that they like any and all software that runs on their hardware.
What’s the problem with the STM32 line’s GPIO? I have an interest in that line and was hoping for FastLED support - and I’d like to know what pitfalls other software using the GPIO will encounter as well.
See: http://www.ebay.com/itm/111322424303
Yes the Nordic nRF51822 is the leading contender for small and cheap BLE + ARM. The RFDuino is one implementation of that. Also see http://www.ebay.com/itm/390852319884 though.
The stm32’s gpio layout is just stupid. Most of the arm chips will take advantage of 32bit wide operations so that with a single 32bit write you can tweak 32 gpio lines. The stm32 only uses the low 16bits of an I/o register and the top 16 bits for something else - but it means I can’t tweak 32gpio lines with a single write.
I’m looking forward to playing more with the nrf51822 - I currently have a laird bl600 dev board, which is based on that.
