General > General Technical Chat
arduiNO or arduiYES
free_electron:
--- Quote from: TK on August 12, 2020, 05:33:35 pm ---
--- Quote from: free_electron on August 12, 2020, 04:52:45 pm ---
--- Quote from: TK on August 12, 2020, 02:32:38 pm ---EE community should be thankful to Arduino for having all the low cost development board options today. It made more positive impacts than negative in the educational and hobby marketplace, and impacted also the whole microcontroller industry as well. Some say teensy is OK but Arduino is not, teensy exists thanks to Arduino (I am not talking about the Arduino branded boards, but about the whole ecosystem)
--- End quote ---
low cost , or low quality ? or both ?
Arduino may be low cost but (hardware) design wise it's pretty poor. And that's the original one. we're not even talking the cheapo knock-offs.
insufficient rail capacitance, bad layout , crap regulators, no protection anywhere , weirdo pin spacing.
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Good enough for 99% of the use cases and you are still looking only at the HW aspect, not seeing the whole picture. It had huge impact on STEM education. Schools spent thousands on expensive Lego robot kits and now they can spend the same and reach a much bigger audience.
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i'm not denying any of that.
The problem is that i see many interns showing up with 'arduino' experience and when they are tasked to make a real design where they have to use the bare chip , come up with their own schematics they fuck it up royally.
They can't even draw a proper schematic or make a correct symbol let alone a correct footprint. They think that the arduino schematics are the way a schematic should be drawn. With wires going through components. And resistors with just two netnames on the pins.
And we haven't even tackled the proper circuitry , only the way it is drawn. Missing and wrong decoupling caps, no clue where to put what , no idea how to scale the power supply. They cobble up something on the bench made from shields and grove and whatnot and then they capture this into a schematic. And it's unreliable as anything. They spend more time troubleshooting and respinning their board because they miss the basics. Any examples they have been given are crap designs.
yesterday i had a request to create a component for a teensy4.1 What a royal fuck up that is...
There is no documentation that shows pin locations so how can i make a footprtin. oh well, its 3.6 based , yes but there's also two new connectors so where are they ? and what is the pinout for those.
I had to cobble it together from github , some forum where someone gracefully had made a STEP model ( i hope it is right .... ) , pictures of the board backside so i could at least see the signal names there. It took me more than an hour to find all the bits of info needed. and that was just so i could position 64 pads ... Then we come to pin numbering. This thing doesn't use pin numbers. They simply name the pins. You can not do that ! you would expect pin1 = VCC , pin 2 = this , pin 3 that. no pin VCC is VCC. pin GND is GND . so how the hell do i line up with a footprint ( you need numbers or letter/number for bga. using just VCC and GND doesn't work. Altium has no issue with it, but other tools do have problems. duplicate pin names are not allowed. ( many analysis programs barf on that as they can't show you where exactly the issue lies. Every pad on the board needs to be uniquely identifyable. ) When parts are made for a central library they have to be compatible with the tools in use , and there is more than just your little schematic. That part may get picked up by someone who sticks it on a complex board and wants to run signal integrity , or power analysis. And those tools may bark if that part is not made right.
So pin 1 is vcc, pin 2 is 0 .. what the hell ? can't we call that GPIO0 ? in the end i encoded it as GPIO0 / TX1 / SDA yadda .. ok all is well.
SO , i got a call : Why did you do that ? why did you not name the pins like in the drawing. You know VCC , 0 , 1 , 2 ? so it lines up ?
Well, cause those drawings are made by people that have no clue how things work in real life. This stuff spread this as the plague and it becomes 'acceptable design practice' and then we waste oodles of time and frustration correcting that... oh, but you have the source. big effing whoop. Source i have to spend hours collecting from various places, that is frequently outdated and selfconflicting.
I was ready to jump out the window. I am tired of such nonsense.
Same thing with Arduino. Why o why do they have a non standard pitch between the connectors ? you cant even stick this thing in a breadboard. And why is the USB port not properly protected ? It creaks and violates USB at so many levels ( power draw for example )
I'm all for making this stuff more accessible , but damn it , show and do it right ! It's not that hard. Now we have a situation where everyone gets free Phillips screws and flat head screwdrivers. Yes it can work , but it is not how it is supposed to work !
westfw:
In general, it's a bad idea to start a new topic until the subject starts to overwhelm the closest matching existing topic. That isn't the case yet.
It's not like Arduino doesn't have its own, very active, forum.
I've been relatively happy to have mostly "relatively advanced" arduino questions show up here.
PerranOak:
Well, the answer is clear: no Arduino section, end of!
SiliconWizard:
--- Quote from: floobydust on August 12, 2020, 04:41:12 am ---I said "no" because Arduino Forums already exist and have millions of posts. Most seem to be noobs with frustrating posts - no schematic, no pics, it's a loose wire or "here is code, why no work?"
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Then there's the problem (already discussed every time some people want to add a new section) that questions are often not specific to the category in question. Many questions about microcontrollers already are programming questions, for instance. If you add a specific Arduino section, you'll just spread out information, and since many people here are likely not much interested in Arduino, it would actually decrease the probability of more general questions being answered.
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