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Arduino's new Nano board family is more powerful and affordable
Arduino's new Nano board family is more powerful and affordable. The most basic one will set out back $9.90.
Arduino's Nano line will soon welcome four new products. They're all small boards like the classic one, making Nano a family of small boards meant for compact projects. All the new boards boast low energy consumption and processors more powerful than what the classic has. Even better, they're all pretty affordable: the most basic entry called Nano Every, which you can use for "everyday" projects and can replace the classic Nano, will even set you back as little as $9.90.
Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi said in a statement:
"The new Nanos are for those millions of makers who love using the Arduino IDE for its simplicity and open source aspect, but just want a great value, small and powerful board they can trust for their compact projects. With prices from as low as $9.90 for the Nano Every, this family fills that gap in the Arduino range, providing makers with the Arduino quality they deserve for those everyday projects."
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @09:55AM (8 children)
I read the hardware specs but they're all Greek to me! What are its limits? I'm a software guy!
(Score: 3, Funny) by RamiK on Wednesday May 22 2019, @10:35AM
It's limited to hardware guys.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Wednesday May 22 2019, @12:07PM (6 children)
Basically, instead of paying $6 on Amazon for a free delivery via Prime ESP8266 derivative for the past several years that has more memory and faster CPU and flash it with micropython or ulisp to program in a modern language, you can possibly pay $19 plus shipping for something with inferior specs shipping in the indeterminate future that you get to program in low level C.
But, kinda like the apple tax, there's people who love to pay more for less as long as its got a cool logo and the cool kids are talking about it (for now).
Admittedly extreme screwing around with obscure stuff requires literacy and thought, whereas the Arduino products are generally ridiculously well documented, such that people too dumb or unmotivated to actually use them for anything can trivially follow tutorials and such. You can tell a lot about the community around a device where the more obscure stuff has social media comments about how some dude is trying to port Haskell to his 8266 to run a homegrown SCADA system for his tabletop fusion reactor, in comparison social media comments on Arduino products is all like "I not know how to use mouse; tell me the needful" "Computer screen is black when power cable is removed which is racist smash the patriarchy now drumpf!" tier stuff.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by epitaxial on Wednesday May 22 2019, @12:37PM (3 children)
Why would I buy a microcontroller with embedded wifi if I didn't need it? Chances are if you need to talk with a device you will find Arduino libraries already written. Cut it with the superiority complex, you're not as bright as you think.
(Score: 2, Troll) by VLM on Wednesday May 22 2019, @01:58PM (2 children)
Because it was one example of something easier to program with more features and better specs that's cheaper. Its hardly an isolated situation.
Fine, you want better specs and cheaper but without wifi (its not like you HAVE to use it, just because its onboard, ya know) with a focus on low power, although admittedly not much easier to use, there's the venerable MSP430 series at about half the price actually shipping for many years as opposed to futuristic vaporware and draws a tenth to a hundredth the electrical power, for example.
There's not much the arduino wins at. I admit there's a large ecosystem of plug -n- play hardware shields, I guess, plus or minus 3.3V vs 5V incompatibilities, so sometimes the project IO reqs might dictate the hardware daughterboard which dictates an arduino pinout but again you can buy anything from PIC32 to ARM with arduino compatible pinouts such that you can use modern hardware and modern dev environments even if stuck with arduino form factor for daughterboard/shield reasons.
Its pretty bad when some of the only arguments for a tool are "it builds character, stamina, and grit, to use the wrong tool for the job" or "muh community"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @01:47AM (1 child)
Your so-called "muh community" is worth so much more than the difference in price between microcontroller A and microcontroller B.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday May 23 2019, @12:00PM
Yeah, as the old saying goes, "it takes a village to blink an LED" ...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @01:26PM (1 child)
Or perhaps you want something that has pretty good resilience to power fluctuations, far lower power usage while operating and better (thriftier) sleep modes, more precise realtime operation, etc etc so you just get an AVR. Why not do your dev with an Arduino? Large education-focused community and tons of tooling, easily adaptable if needs be. Well designed and tough little boards.
You pick what works. If you want a cheap limited MCU with good connectivity features, an ESP is fine. If you just want some sloppy/slow GPIO or are restricted to standard buses, need lots of compute and don't care about your power budget at all, you might get something in ARM flavour.
Or you can just rant about something you don't understand on the internet while trying to masturbate over how clever you are. Whatever makes you happy.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 22 2019, @02:22PM
I'm pretty sure there's an Arduino shield for that with a vibrant and inclusive developer community.
The brutal fact of engineering is most things are ideal for something under some obscure conditions, although really bad products are ideal for nothing at all, when even bad "fits" are still better across the board (get the pun, board, LOL?)