Just got one of these. Played around with Spin a little, was

TI offers something similar to Arduino, but the controller is socketed, so once you program it you just pop it out of the board and put it in another system. I don't remember what it was called though.

Does it have a free (free beer) C compiler?

>>61205181
literally nothing
did some inverse differential kinematics once for a robotic arm i had in mind but shit was so slow with even a 3x3 jacobian and i needed a 3x5 jacobian to control all joints
the project it self was decently cheap since i can 3d print shit at school for free so the mpu and the servos were the only costly parts
might try again some day with an fpga or a more powerful mpu, it would have worked well, made a simulation in matlab using the atmega328 but it was just too slow

>>61205224
Saw those. Went with Propeller because it really jives with my philosophy of computing. It's like the Smalltalk of microcontrollers.

>>61205235
Yes. GCC-based.

>>61205294
Actually the Propeller might be pretty good for that. 8 cores at 80 mhz. 160 MIPS. Compared to 1MIPS of the ATmega328

>>61205343
neat, that one is really cheap as well
it should be able to do it
a 6x6 matrix inverse is a really heavy operation still though, but easily pipelined with access to multiple cores

how well does it handle floating point operations?

>>61205224
MSP launchpad and Energia?

>>61205459
No FPU, but the philosophy of the Propeller is when it doesn't have something on board, just throw a core at it, so it ends up not being a huge issue. There's also sine and log tables on the chip, which make it even less of an issue.

>>61205640
>>61205459
I also want to point out it's not something you'd have to roll your own. Parallax hosts an "object exchange" where Parallax, themselves, and the community have contributed high-quality implementations of things like FP.

File: 1498754573930.jpg (46KB, 960x960px) Image search: [Google]

46KB, 960x960px

>>61205294
Shit i never thought that 8 cores at 80 MHz would still be that slow.

Then again it does not have a FPU.
To think that i thought that this shit will pull off simple CV and a framebuffer from an external ram.
>mfw

>>61207103
I think he was talking about the ATmega328 there. My question was "What have you done with your uC project," and he answered with uCs generally, not about the Propeller specifically.

>>61207190
Yeah you're right, i just misread.
Wish that the propeller was a tiny bit cheaper tho.

>>61207279
Is $8 really that expensive? Cost doesn't seem to matter that much for a hobbyist, and it's pretty comparable in cost even to chips that are far less capable.

>>61207732
$8 is kind of expensive compared to something like a $2 ATmega328, and for chips like this, computing power often isn't the limiting factor.

>>61207732
Not really but the opposite is also true , there are chips that perform better and are cheaper.
However everything depends on the project.

>>61205224
TI MSP

>>61205294
Neeeeeeerd!!!!!

>>61205459
Just get one of those cheap as chips STM32 dev boards. You can get one for like 4 dollars.
Plenty of them feature a FPU.

If you look around you might find a TI stelaris one which has decent support.

>>61207897
MSP430 to be precise, the newer ones are soldered and are less interesting.

Also, I remember the TI free sample program, combine this with their MSP430 boards being only 4.30 at the time and it was grand. For about 15 dollars due to shipping you get the dev board which included an additional MSP430 and if you played your cards right pretty much a sample of every compatible MSP430 you could get your grubby hands on.

>>61207788
Yeah, if you're buying hundreds or thousands of them but need only the performance of an ATmega328, you're wasting your money and it's expensive. But then you probably weren't looking at the other $8 chips anyway. In this case, the Propeller isn't expensive -- it's just simply the wrong chip for your needs.

And as a hobbyist, the $2 vs. $8 isn't that big of a deal for me, personally, seeing as I build few permanent projects and can still use Arduino if I want. But at this point I would rather get really good at one chip that can do everything I need (I originally bought the Propeller because I wanted to do some things that the ATmega328 just wasn't suited to do,namely, retro-style computing).

If I do start building more frequent permanent projects and start finding that $8 a burden, then sure, I'll learn proper AVR too, then I'll be good at an $8 chip for things that need that power, and will get good at a $2 chip for when I don't.