I think the G120 and/or G120HDR boards are so much better. Much faster, a ton more memory, full tcp stack and you get to program in a high level language: C#. This also means that there are a ton of libraries, should you need any. And the price is the same.
If they ever reach 16-bits (or beyond!), our lab may buy them weekly. The 10-bit resolution of the Arduino ADC is the biggest single thing that's kept us from switching to them for general-purpose DAQ.
The speed with which Physics undergrads can pick up the Arduino environment trumps anything else we use. Yes, we can implement I2C/SPI communication to another ADC chip, but the development environment isn't nearly as stable (chips and vendor-specific serial protocols change). The knowledge that the Arduino codebase should remain moderately stable over time makes it worth our trouble to develop for it.
Interesting, I tried to read the article and my browser (Chrome V22) went nuts. I don't know what sort of JS wired is pushing these days but from this side of the screen it made their site unusable. Sad really. So I went to the http://arduino.cc site ('official Arduino site') and it has no news about a 32 bit Arduino. Ther is an article on Hackaday though : http://hackaday.com/2012/10/03/finally-an-arm-powered-arduin...
Having recently read about the Sony Nexus fake I find myself even more distrustful of tech journalists.
From the hackaday article it looks like it could be an improvement on the original concept.
from the article:
The Due will continue to work with all Arduino shields [..] that conform to the official Arduino Revision 3 layout. However, the Due operates at 3.3V whereas AVR-based Arduinos operate at 5V, meaning some third-party shields that don’t follow the R3 specs to the letter may not be compatible [..]
The value in the Arduino is not necessarily in the actual processor, but in the tools, documentation, tutorials and library supplied with the boards. And of course in its large community of users and addons ('shields').
It does a hell of a lot more than what the propeller can. The chip they use has on-board ADCs and DACs, which makes it a lot easier to interface with analog signals out of the box. It also has a lot more RAM, DMA access so you don't need to use CPU clocks to pull things in and out of memory, support for pretty much any bus you need -- on-board USB slave and host, SPI, I2C, CAN, etc -- for talking to anything in the world. The Propeller was an interesting chip 6 years ago, but the world's more than caught up and surpassed it, with its only saving grace being that it's a cheap multicore chip, but even then, the XMOS chips are far more interesting there.
True, but FPGAs are harder to code for, and more expensive. I work with both platforms and find them about as easy to code on, with the Prop costing a little less but requiring external parts to do ADC/DAC.
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