I just noticed this video interview about the Arduino Zero.
http://makezine.com/2015/05/17/talking- … ero-atmel/
Interestingly, if you scrub in to 1 minute 30, they guy says that the primary IDE will be Atmel Studio and not the Arduino IDE, and that Atmel Studio will have the ability to import Arduino Sketches, and will have full debugging capabilities.
This is a really interesting development, as it somewhat sidelines the IDE that is still under constant development by Federico etc.
I’m not sure if the “Arduino Zero” that is being described in the video is the “Zero Pro” that Arduino LLC are selling, or whether its the “Arduino Zero” which the other side of Arduino still has on their website. (www.arduino.cc)
In the interview they say that the Arduino IDE will eventually have very basic debugging features, but the implication is that you’d now use Atmel Studio for this board.
They were spruiking (Aussie word for pushing) the Zero as an IoT device, which is a bit of a joke really, as its not. Anyone wanting to do IoT is better off with an ESP8266.
So far I’ve not seen any mention of cost.
BTW. I didn’t realise that the Zero is only a cortex-m3 device. Frankly if I was Atmel, unless this board is intended to be ultra cheap, I’d be putting in a cortex-m4 to compete with the Teensy.
Is Atmel Studio not just a fork of Micro$oft Visual Studio?
Which compiler does it use?
What restrictions does it pose in terms of licensing?
What restrictions does it pose in terms of adding new (non Atmel) cores to the mix?
I think Eclipse might be a smarter option if you want to escape from the Arduino IDE.
I’d think the difference between teensy and arduino is still that the libraries work without porting.
If they would use an m4 they couldnt use every pin, as they arent available in a lqfp48 package (or are they?) and it would be not great to not pinout everything or to make a new standart.
They could have use the m4 and sell it then as a due 2 or similar.
~Straw
Interestingly, the zero in the video looks pretty much identical to the Zero pro on Adafruit
http://www.adafruit.com/product/2417
But I nearly fell of my chair when I saw the price.
STM32F103RE + STM32F103C8 (for BMP) would be a much more cost effective board, as well as being faster and generally better.
Re: M4
Yes, I guess. But its not necessary to break out every pin on the processor. The M4 can run at a faster clock (180Mhz) as well as having a FPU etc etc
You are right, perhaps they will do it as a Due 2. But as the Due is as far as I can tell, not very successful, I’m not sure they’d bother.
I presumed that the Zero would end up being the ARM replacement for the Uno, but looking at the price, I can’t see many people spending 3 or 4 times as much for their starter board.
@ahull
yes. Atmel Studio does raise a load of issue in terms of the open source nature of things.
Visual Studio now has a “community version” but the licensing on it are for open source projects only. Which is a bit odd, as it implies that if I want to make a thing just for me personally, and I’m not going to release it as open source, then technically I can’t use Visual Studio (or perhaps I miss read the terms).
I can’t see is Visual Studio is available for OSX and Linux, there are statements saying you can compile for Linux, but I didn’t see anything that said there was a linux x64 binary
I’m not sure who is in charge of Arduino.cc but it seems that they are loosing total control of things, if they have decided that people need to use Atmel Studio from now on.
Where does this leave the IDE dev’s ?
What is the purpose of Arduino.cc , are they just going to do other stuff like make 3D printers and their IoT stuff.
Very odd. I don’t understand their reasoning
EDIT
I just posted to the IDE developers group, so it will be interesting to hear what they have to say.
As the guy in the video at 01:38 says “The primary interface will be Atmel Studio”
This may just be referring to debugging, but its hard to tell
That means we could use their binaries instead of the texane stlink stuff. The texane stlink stuff is simpler however the openocd stuff is much more complete. It supports nucleo boards, discovery boards and stlink v1, v2 and v2.1 not to mention a whole pile of other vendors out of the box. The scripting is a little more complex. However seeing as they already made a recipe for openocd in the platform.txt, you just have to follow their lead.
Zero ia a cortex-m0+ (Von Neumann architecture not Harvard). It will be inherently slower than m3/m4 and only smaller subset of the ARM thumb2 cortex instruction set.
People who use the Arduino IDE aren’t going to switch to an Atmel Studio, Eclipse, Netbeans, or PSoc Creator. They just don’t want to devote that level of effort to go up to the next level. I don’t think the simple Arduino IDE is going anywhere.
Also, last I looked Atmel studio is windows only.
-rick
Ehe orders the pcbs and uses her pick and place in the Name of arduino and places the adafruit Logo on it. But she still uses the original board layout. She was already involved in the arduino micro and the gemma is also now an official arduino.CC product.
To the crazy fight: in what relation are the LCC guys With the .CC guys?
~Straw
Meanwhile the STM32F7 will be available this year, Microchip has about 1-2 years the MX series, TI is making outstanding (more special needs) MCU’s, the Rasperry pi 2 costs about 45USD (ok, I know not the same thing…) not to speak about ESP’s,PSoC’s, teensies,… AND atmel studio as main IDE (hello to linux, hello to OSX)?!?! So you can learn eclipse, coocox, keil… in the same time as beginner!
The real advantage of the UNO was the DIP Atmega328: Buy one board and buy some spare 328-chips for you projects and program it with the “main board” and this as absolutely novice programmer/hacker/developer/tinkerguy.
The DUE was a complete fail: Too expensive, totally neglected by the dev team and nothing to tinker around: If you finished a project as novice you have to pay the next board. I bought it (as clone) and I left it in the corner. my really first 32bit MCU attempt was a tiva launchpad with energia (in my eyes a totally underestimated board/mcu!) I learned everything about it just with the TI-documents/data sheets and all the low level commands (register settings) were well described in the manuals and supported by energia without detours.
EDIT: Something to laugh about:
The official austrian reseller sold the DUE about 45USD and the zero for 49 USD 
I still use v4.19. This supports gcc (WINAVR) and a few payware compilers (Kiel and IAR). Most of my work was in ASM until a few years back when I needed a Fat File System. My legacy code depends on it.
Studio six, wants to support everything. It is over a gigabyte to download and Dependant on .NET.
The excuse for staying with .NET is that they have a lot of resources (In Trondheim) invested in it. That to scrap the early work would be a waste of effort. I am not sure that some of these market drones realize the waste of effort the users have to go through.
I started with 68HC11, then went to 8051. The “russian” programmers could not get the 8051 to work so added an Atmel chip to handle the I/O. due to need for a common baud clock, I found the AVR could run at MIDI rates. (The product was a Floppy disk MIDI file player for a piano) By the time I was done there was no need for the 8051 or the ST support chip. By the time I had it working Floppy disks were dead. It took my 5 years to write and debug my own RTOS.
What this has to do with the subject at hand was how it all started. The reference design Schematics for the V1.0 debugger/programmer leaked out. This was a JTAG device. Atmel also had a true ICE (I still have two of these) There were only 5 chips in the family. One had an 8051 footprint. The one I used had the footprint still used by the m328. The other 3 footprints were die optimized. These became the mega and Tiny.
When the butterfly came out, I ported the debugger code to it. Others ported the bootloader code to the butterfly. Then Atmel came out with the MarkII, then Arduino came out. By that time the cost of programming clones was through the floor. I got zero feedback on the work I did, but who cares, the system was a success.
This is why I am now attracted here. A small scrappy focused project that works.
Massimo replied saying the Arduino IDE was here to stay, however Paul (PJRC Teensy) wrote a very long reply disagreeing
It’s hard to know where this is heading, but as Ray says, it doesn’t look like this will impact this project very much.
@rick
Ti Launchpad looks amazing value, but I suspect the postage will cost me at least as much as the hardware as I don’t live in the U.S. 
I will consider buying one, just to add to my collection, but I’ve not even managed to get around to using my Cypress PSoC boards I ordered before Christmas (mainly because I was worried about bricking them)
Re: OSX
If Atmel studio is basically MS visual studio ( ref what Andy said) and MS are pushing VS2015 community edition for multiple platforms, its only a matter of time before Atmel piggy back on that work and support OSX and Linux.
But I guess it depends in their strategy. E.g. If they don’t expect a good outcome from Arduino vs Arduino it makes sense for them to hedge their bets and encourage people to their brand.
Actually, even the third party hardware support in the current IDE is a commercial negative for Atmel. As prior to that, it was effective a one brand system.
Anyway… We live in interesting times indeed.
Can’t you dual boot your Macbook ?
I have 4 year old Macbook pro (new’ish shape) and used bootcamp to run XP and more recently W7 by dual booting.
Actually getting W7 to work was far more of a problem than XP, specifically the drivers. As the bootcamp installer package I had to download, said that my Macbook wasnt compatible with W7 (which was incorrect), I ended up having to unpack the installer package and manually run the installer bin that the wrapper / version checker calls.
After that it was fine !
But I suppose that XP drivers for newer hardware may be an issue, as your hardware sounds newer than mine.
Can’t you dual boot your Macbook ?
http://forum.43oh.com/topic/7743-goodbye-ti/#entry62318
I also contacted TI european headquarter and talked with a nice lady, followed up by 2 or 3 E-mails, but without success (short version).
Samsung has thrown its hat into the Internet of Things ring with its ARTIK platform. Consisting of three boards, each possesses a capability proportional to their size. The smallest comes in at just 12x12mm, but still packs a dual core processor running at 250MHz on top of 5 MB flash with bluetooth. The largest is 29x39mm and sports a 1.3GHz ARM, 18 gigs of memory and an array of connectivity. The ARTIK platform is advertised to be completely compatible with the Arduino platform.
I guess the big news here is that some moneys must be going into support for the Arduino GUI and the necessary enhancements that will be needed. As they prominently display Massimo Banzi’s picture, my guess is that the GUI will be the Arduino.cc flavor one…
Here is the current lineup of devices: https://www.artik.io/ but I have not seen the pricing yet. In fact, I’m not sure if these things will actually be out in the wild, per se, because of this: https://www.artik.io/developer
And, the SOC guys are even getting in on the fun: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/15 … 9-computer
Check out the money raised by the above project !!!
Ray
alu PCB with round corners (US patent)
tringular headers (magsafe) with 2.22 mm pitch (“I-header”)
proprietary protocols for: I-spi, I-2c, I-ART
delivered with “I-of-I-things” IDE (IOS, OSX only)
starter kit available at USD 299
alu PCB with round corners (US patent)
tringular headers (magsafe) with 2.22 mm pitch (“I-header”)
proprietary protocols for: I-spi, I-2c, I-ART
delivered with “I-of-I-things” IDE (IOS, OSX only)
starter kit available at USD 299
alu PCB with round corners (US patent)
tringular headers (magsafe) with 2.22 mm pitch (“I-header”)
proprietary protocols for: I-spi, I-2c, I-ART
delivered with “I-of-I-things” IDE (IOS, OSX only)
starter kit available at USD 299
alu PCB with round corners (US patent)
tringular headers (magsafe) with 2.22 mm pitch (“I-header”)
proprietary protocols for: I-spi, I-2c, I-ART
delivered with “I-of-I-things” IDE (IOS, OSX only)
starter kit available at USD 299
And the I-duino is not compatible with 3rd party hardware which isnt aproved by apple.
And every Update will makes it slower, so you buy the I-duino 2S
~Straw
Guess the S Version comes with a “shiny” LED, you just need to pay 100$ more
~Straw
Guess the S Version comes with a “shiny” LED, you just need to pay 100$ more
~Straw
The IDE is a very poor code editor. It’s main trick is its auto make file creation, which also handles adding libraries, and it has in built uploading, and of course its cross platform ( and open source), and its not a massive and complicated install.
IMHO what has made the Arduino concept successful is mainly …
The use of the Wiring API, to provide a basic form of HAL
Hiding all the device startup code
Supplied core libraries for SPI and I2C etc
Boards that don’t need external programming hardware.
Boards that are now low cost.
And… As the platform became more and more successful, the huge number of compatible libraries.
But I’m sure I missed something
It looks like Atmel are working behind the scenes with Visual Micro ( at least I think that’s what Tim from Visual Micro was implying )
It will be interesting to see where it all ends.
It looks like Atmel are working behind the scenes with Visual Micro ( at least I think that’s what Tim from Visual Micro was implying )
It will be interesting to see where it all ends.
I am currently using the STM32F373 – mainly because it offers 3 independent 16 bit differential input ADCs. It is however spec’ed to 72MHz, not sure if it could be taken much higher.
Core: ARM® 32-bit Cortex®-M4 CPU (72 MHz
max), single-cycle multiplication and HW
division, DSP instruction with FPU (floatingpoint
unit) and MPU (memory protection unit)
http://www.st.com/web/en/resource/techn … 046749.pdf
It’s very nearly pin compatible with the STM32F103 – and a board designed for the ‘103 should accept a ‘373 with very little modification.
Ken
I am currently using the STM32F373 – mainly because it offers 3 independent 16 bit differential input ADCs. It is however spec’ed to 72MHz, not sure if it could be taken much higher.
Core: ARM® 32-bit Cortex®-M4 CPU (72 MHz
max), single-cycle multiplication and HW
division, DSP instruction with FPU (floatingpoint
unit) and MPU (memory protection unit)
http://www.st.com/web/en/resource/techn … 046749.pdf
It’s very nearly pin compatible with the STM32F103 – and a board designed for the ‘103 should accept a ‘373 with very little modification.
Ken