An Arduino by any other name…

I was trying to make some headway on my robotic platform project, so I went digging through boxes in my office to find the large, 12v SLA battery that I know I have somewhere. While searching I found a bunch of stuff: hundreds of red LEDs in a pack, two Arduinos, a Sparkfun breakoutboard for an electret microphone, a bunch of level converters, and a Teensy 3.0. But of course, no battery.

So, I played a bit with the Teensy.teensy

The Teensy 3.0 is an older version of the more modern Teensy 3.1 and the Teensy LC (which I have on order right now from Sparkfun). It’s a, well, teensy board: only 1.4″ x 0.7″ It has a 32 bit arm processor which has 128K of flash and 16kb of RAM, and a bunch of peripherals. You have to solder on your own header pins, but it would be easy to do so and put it on a breadboard. And, what’s sort of cool, you can program it pretty much exactly like an Arduino. Same setup()/loop() structure. You use pinMode(), digitalRead() and digitalWrite(). The Serial objects work the same. Pretty cool.

As a first (but not particularly challenging) test, I downloaded my Morse beacon code. It worked fine, with no changes: the Teensy even uses pin 13 to flash its tiny onboard orange led. Pretty nifty.

I’ve been pondering using Arduino Mini/Nanos for future projects, but I’m kind of viewing the ATMega328 chip that underlies those Arduinos as a bit of a dinosaur. These chips are a lot faster, and at around $13 for the Teensy LC (which has same clock rate, but only 64K flash and 8K memory) I think I may have found a better embeddable CPU for projects.

Addendum: the Teensy family is well supported with platformio as well.

One thought on “An Arduino by any other name…

  1. Ken Boak

    Mark, There are an increasing number of micros that can run compiled Arduino code. I’m tinkering with STM32F103xx at the moment, plus the ZPUino that is a FPGA softcore – that runs at 96MHz on the Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA – specifically the Papilio boards from Gadget Factory. What sort of a dinosaur do you think the ATmega328 is? I’m guessing a brontosaurus – slow and ponderous with very little memory!

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