Another "The Next Arduino" Candidate...

[bullet308]

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/18182218/freesoc-and-freesoc-mini?ref=home_spotlight

Cypress PsOC5-based. 

?

[westfw]

Too expensive and too complicated to replace Arduino.  There's no way the average arduino user can navigate the Cypress tool used for defining peripherals from the on-chip FPGA.  At the Cypress class I attended, one of the other students commented that lumping HW design and SW design into the same IDE "broke" traditional separation of those roles in most "real work" environments.

Neat in its own right.  The Cypress PSoC is an interesting set of chips.

[Monkeh]

nice startrek looking but how are we going to make shield for that? the author should study more about things like why the arduino pins are nonsymetric.

To make it awkward to make your own shields, increasing sales of the official ones?

Nah, can't be anything like that.

[GeoffS]

If you can live without shields (or can design your own equivalent), this one may be a good alternative.
 Unlike the kickstarter ones, it actually exists, but like the kickstarters ones, thery're out of stock. 

Prices from memory was about $45.

[poptones]

The arduino pins should be assymmetric, but NOT the way they did it. The way they did it makes it a pain in the ass to use a perfboard. Fuckers. If anything it should be redesigned to align on a .1" grid. Or better still just use the tinys and nanos and say fuck the shields.

[gxti]

Nah, can't be anything like that.

You're right, it can't. Arduino hasn't cornered the market on PCBs with off-grid headers, as evidenced by this very product. Any assclown with a PCB design tool can do it. It's just the poor saps using veroboard who are screwed. Hanlon's Razor applies here -- never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

As for the end connectors, that's a total cockup. They should have at least made some of them coplanar so you can make expansion boards that need more than one set of pins. Maybe one to each side and then three on the end. But I still wouldn't buy one, this chip is just too pretty to live.