Arduino venting

[Bruce Abbott]

it happened when Banzi announced the new Arduino/Zero (arm), which has a debug chip installed,

Arduino Zero

The Atmel Embedded Debugger (EDBG) implements a JTAG interface in order to program the on-board SAMD21 and is also connected to hardware serial of the microcontroller. This means that the 'Serial' class responds to the programming port of the board. The Arduino Zero has been designed in collaboration with ATMEL, and the on-board EDBG can be used through ATMEL Studio to get full access to the microcontroller memories to help debug your code.

So you 'serious' developers can debug the Arduino Zero to your heart's content, while the rest of us get on with just doing stuff.

Quite the joke is it really. My PC has a 2.8GHz Pentium D processor, but apparently this is far too slow because it takes over 2 minutes to load Atmel studio 6 - by which time I am bored and decide to do something else instead. Compare that to the Arduino IDE which loads in 15 seconds. I could have written a program, downloaded it into the Arduino and had it running before Atmel's bloatware even gets started. 

But what do I know? I'm just an old curmudgeon who's been coding micros since 1980, not a serious programmer...   

[Bassman59]

Quite the joke is it really. My PC has a 2.8GHz Pentium D processor, but apparently this is far too slow because it takes over 2 minutes to load Atmel studio 6 - by which time I am bored and decide to do something else instead.

Preach it, brother! I've got a 3-ish GHz quad Core i7 machine with 16 GB RAM running 64-bit Windows 7 and Atmel Studio 6 (still 32 bit? Fuck that) takes forever to load. I spend the time waiting for it to load looking for alternatives. So far the GNU ARM Eclipse plug-ins looks very promising. (If only the SAM-ICE I bought wasn't Yet Another Proprietary Fucking JTAG Dongle.)

But what do I know? I'm just an old curmudgeon who's been coding micros since 1980, not a serious programmer... 

Kids today, they don't know the pain (and the expense) of the Nohau bond-out pod 8051 emulator, with AMONG OTHER ANNOYANCES was its inability to do MOVX with an 8-bit address (something that I've never seen a compiler support, but handy from assembly if you use P2 for port I/O). Bonus: the pod always blew up the afternoon before the product was supposed to go out the door.

[Muxr]

(and he said that) - "to debug something you just need the serial print" - oh my goodness 

'serial print'? 'debug'? If my code doesn't work I just go back to the source and fix it. 

Since the Arduino is already connected to the PC via a serial port, wouldn't 'serial print' be the obvious way to debug it?

Arduino was designed for people who just want to write a routine and get it running with minimum hassle. No messing around with compilers and linkers, programmers, in circuit debuggers etc. It even creates the main loop for you. This is not a platform for 'serious' developers...

I agree, now micro based projects can include 'serious' hobbyists, 'serious' artists, and'serious' Ham Radio operators. 

 Opening microcontroller development for the masses seems to often bring scorn from some elitists. Now not all have to pay the same 'dues' to gain fun, fame, and happiness in their specific endeavors.  Gate-keeping is so 20th century.
The Arduino developers are neither Saints nor Gods, just a group that happen to have a good idea at a good time for a new user base.

+1

Yup. It's pretty easy to criticize other people's work. Heck i've been programming for the past 30 years and I am pretty sure you can find some jank code in most of my projects that could use refactoring.

The thing is my best code never gets shipped, but the code that gets written in a hurry under crazy deadlines always does. Such is the nature of what we do I suppose.

I certainly appreciate what Arduino folks accomplished, because for all its technical flaws Arduino is still the best beginner uController environment around. Their focus was clearly on the accessibility and not on the highest industrial robustness of their implementation.

[gmb42]

Quite the joke is it really. My PC has a 2.8GHz Pentium D processor, but apparently this is far too slow because it takes over 2 minutes to load Atmel studio 6 - by which time I am bored and decide to do something else instead.

But what do I know? I'm just an old curmudgeon who's been coding micros since 1980, not a serious programmer... 

Hmm, a 2.8GHz Pentium D was the slowest Pentium available when initially manufactured in 2005 or 2006, I would think that you're not Atmel's target market.  For comparison, using a 2 yr old i7-4770K with an SSD, Atmel 6.2 opens a (not insignificant) project in under 10 seconds.

No one is forcing you to upgrade, but a more modern system would be much nicer to use in all sorts of ways.

[c4757p]

Running an IDE is normally one of the lighter tasks a computer can do..... there's not much more in Atmel Studio that has to be loaded immediately (options deep in menus that can be loaded when requested need not apply) that is larger than the VB6 I recall running before 2000!

Lots of people have to use IDEs on older computers. My capstone project team at school last year switched to a pure arm-none-eabi-gcc solution because Atmel Studio was unusable on the machine the school gave us. I wouldn't be surprised to find many places of work in similar positions. That computer was not all too old... it ran matlab quite fast as I recall... Atmel Studio is extremely bloated as IDEs go.

[mikerj]

The eevblog forums are not for prudes and sissies.

The eevblog is for amateurs and professionals who enjoy helping each other solve problems.  It's not here for people to behave like spoilt children.  Grow up and behave yourself.

[ralphd]

The eevblog forums are not for prudes and sissies.

The eevblog is for amateurs and professionals who enjoy helping each other solve problems.  It's not here for people to behave like spoilt children.  Grow up and behave yourself.

So that puts you in the condesending prude category to think you control how I behave.
Go whine to Dave and see how far that gets you.

[Bruce Abbott]

Hmm, a 2.8GHz Pentium D was the slowest Pentium available when initially manufactured in 2005 or 2006,

Yeah right.

Tom's Hardware: Mother of All CPU Charts 2005/2006

For comparison, using a 2 yr old i7-4770K with an SSD, Atmel 6.2 opens a (not insignificant) project in under 10 seconds.

Not everybody can afford (or wants) to upgrade their PC every 2 years. But anyway I was talking about the time it takes for the IDE itself to load, not how long it takes to open a project.

[ralphd]

take credit for other people's work the way Banzi does.

This seems to be at the core of your distaste for Arduino.

No, that's at the core of my distaste for Banzi.  My distaste for the Arduino core comes from reading the source.  There are times I have cringed from reading code that is so bad.
For comparison, avr-libc, although it hasn't been bug-free, is generally well written.  A few things in it are sub-optimal, and some things are done in a different way than I would but still fall within the scope of acceptable software design.

[ralphd]

Wiring is a fine example of a rather abandoned project :-(

Don't count it out yet.  I have first-hand information from someone claiming to be on the development team saying they are still working on Wiring, and Hernando is still involved.
And although I won't disclose personal communications, I will say that my perception is that the team is at least confused by Banzi, and probably annoyed.

[gmb42]

Hmm, a 2.8GHz Pentium D was the slowest Pentium available when initially manufactured in 2005 or 2006,

Yeah right.

Tom's Hardware: Mother of All CPU Charts 2005/2006

Note sure what this is referencing, I used the font of all knowledge, WikiPedia looking at Pentium D.  Further checking with Intel in their archive for "Legacy Pentium Processors" gives this for Presler and this for Smithfield, and you're right, they did make a slower one, the mutant offspring 805 with a glorius 2.66GHz clock.  My point was that a 2.8GHz CPU was (almost) the slowest Pentium D made.  Yes it was faster than older CPUs, but it is definitely showing it's age now.

For comparison, using a 2 yr old i7-4770K with an SSD, Atmel 6.2 opens a (not insignificant) project in under 10 seconds.

Not everybody can afford (or wants) to upgrade their PC every 2 years. But anyway I was talking about the time it takes for the IDE itself to load, not how long it takes to open a project.

My info wan't clear, that time includes starting the IDE.  I double clicked the solution file in Explorer.

Regardless, my point wasn't to boast, but to show that attempting to castigate a piece of software for poor performance on a CPU nearly a decade old is slightly unfair IMO.

[Bruce Abbott]

Hmm, a 2.8GHz Pentium D was the slowest available when initially manufactured in 2005 or 2006...

My point was that a 2.8GHz CPU was (almost) the slowest Pentium D made.

Moving the goalposts? The Pentium D was most certainly not the slowest CPU around in 2005 - it was actually one of the fastest. To then turn around and label the 2.8GHz version as 'almost the slowest' simply because the top speed grade was 3.2GHz is disingenuous.

Now consider that Atmel Studio 6 was released in February 2002.  What was the fastest CPU you could get back then? Some of us remember those times, and we are sick of being told to buy faster hardware just so software can become even more bloated.

my point wasn't to boast, but to show that attempting to castigate a piece of software for poor performance on a CPU nearly a decade old is slightly unfair

Your system has a top-of-the-line CPU and a solid state hard drive. I bet it cost plenty and is worth boasting about. So boast away, we don't mind. 

What I do mind is expecting hobbyists, students and others with limited funds to spend big bucks on a more powerful PC, just so they can enjoy debugging their Arduino at a reasonable speed. What's the point of releasing a cheap dev board that doesn't need any extra debugging hardware, if you then have to spend hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars to make your PC powerful enough to use it? The answer is:- you shouldn't have to. That's why debugging via the serial port is still a valid option.

[NiHaoMike]

If you need a micro for a professional project and are using Arduino, well, that's pretty much a telltale to me that something is wrong. I never thought people were basing real designs on them until I saw one show up in a product I was looking over.

Even though I mostly work with PICs, I did a design for work with an embedded Arduino Leonardo to make it easier for others to maintain the code as time goes on. I have also come across many other internally developed tools (e.g. relay boards and thermal diode readers) that were based on Arduino.

[westfw]

consider that Atmel Studio 6 was released in February 2002

Um.  No.  2012, perhaps?  http://www.atmel.com/tools/STUDIOARCHIVE.aspx

Fortunately, one tends to spend so much time inside an IDE that its startup time is pretty irrelevant. One DOES wonder what it is that AS is doing to be so slow on "typical" systems, though.

[matseng]

For comparison, using a 2 yr old i7-4770K with an SSD, Atmel 6.2 opens a (not insignificant) project in under 10 seconds.

Not everybody can afford (or wants) to upgrade their PC every 2 years. But anyway I was talking about the time it takes for the IDE itself to load, not how long it takes to open a project.

I currently do all my development for ARM, golang and nodejs on a 2013 MacBook. Atmel Studio boot up (under Win7 on a Parallels VM in OSX) in less than 13 seconds. It is kinda irritating, but as said here previously you only start it like once a day so it really doesn't matter.  But I must admit that I still look back in awe at the good old stuff like Turbo Pascal that fitted on a 360 KB floppy, was a complete IDE with debugger, started up in a few seconds and compiled the code like greased lightning even on a 4.77 MHz 8088.