The quest for more POWER!

Got some new toys to add to the big pile of dev boards!

I’ve been messing with Atmel AVRs for over a decade now.   Recently started doing some homers with the Arduino Uno board (Solar logging and weather station project) which has been working pretty well.   I’ve picked up some other arduino type dev boards such as the digispark along the way.   Nice and easy.   But 32k of Flash gets a little small 🙂   The Uno on the weather station is pretty much full.   I want to add a nordic nRF24 module to the weather station to log data from a remote node but this pushes it way over the limit.

So.. need bigger chips!   Could have gone down the Arduino Mega route with the Atmel ATMega chip.   But that is dull as I’ve used that chip a lot already.   Need something that I’ve not done that much with…. ARM!

P1060863

Arduino Uno on the left, 16MHz AVR with 32k flash and 2k SRAM.   On the right is an Arduino Due with the Atmel SAM3 Arm sporting 256k of flash, 96k of SRAM and a Cortex-M3 core running at 84MHz.   Phew, I won’t know what to do with all that spare space!

At the top is a clone of the Maple Mini.   Again an Arm Cortex-M3 but a bit smaller with only 128k flash and 20k SRAM.   But it was cheap and looks neat.   The arduino shield platform is nice but takes up space.

So, time to get down and dirty with some bare metal Arm development.