brainwagon

Today, through a bit of serendipity involving twitter and the web, I managed to have lunch with Nanode designer Ken Boak, who happened to be on an unrelated visit to the Bay Area this week. We exchanged brief messages for the first time a couple of weeks ago, as I was intrigued with his idea of making a version of BASIC that ran on the Arduino/Nanode. He was kind enough to leave me with a couple of his latest version to experiment with. Compared to the v5 version that I got as a gift (purchased from wickeddevice.com) and assembled last week, these have a few cool new additions:

• The screw terminals have been removed, and a small wireless module put in their place.
• The board has a 32K static SRAM for storage.
• It has a micro SD card slot on the bottom for long term storage.
• It has a real time clock on the bottom.

Pretty darned cool! The new version seems better to me in every way., and I thank Ken for dropping some of them off for me (and also for a couple of coworkers who are interested in Arduino programming). I’ll be working to use them in a future project for sure, and if you are interested in having a highly interconnected Arduino compatible board to play with at a reasonable cost, I can recommend the Nanode (although I’d wait until Wicked Device starts carrying the new variety, the old V5 design lacks some of these cool features).

I see the Nanode as a cool evolution of the basic Arduino platform. The Arduino does a lot right, but there are a few things that bother me.

• Cost.. Yeah, they are cheap. But let’s face it, they aren’t that cheap. The Uno (around $30) is just an ATmega328 (about $2 in quantity), an ATmega16u2 (again about $2) to provide USB, and then a handful of discrete components. You get a bunch of pins broken out, but no actual peripherals or connectors. No switches. No (or maybe one) LED. No additional memory or RTC. No SD card socket. My rather silly Arduino n’ Gameduino Satellite Tracker costs nearly $100 in parts, which makes the entire project less interesting, because it could be done as cheaply with more capable technology. The Nanode makes it a bit more tractable: it has a real time clock, and can even do NTP to set the time and fetch new elements over Ethernet. Thus, I think the nanode gives you some added value.
• Flexibility in development environment. When I first started with the Arduino, it bothered me a little that I needed a sixty megabyte download of a programming environment to program this little controller with maybe just 16K of memory. Even if you just wanted to blink an LED, you had to compile and reflash code. Back in the days of my youth, we didn’t have the benefit of cool optimizing compilers, but we DID have the benefit of cool interactive programming environments. Ken’s idea of creating a Tiny BASIC programming environment brings some of that back. Sure, it’s not for everyone, but for simple experiments and education, the interactivity is useful. The technology that enables this for the Nanode is the inclusion of a 32K serial SRAM: we can store programs in this RAM and interpret code directly out of them.
• Cheap, flexible peripherals. I have some Xbees to play with, but they are a bit spendy really. An Xbee costs about $22 or so last I checked, and to interface them with an Uno, you’ll need another shield which costs around $20 by itself. Tacking $45 onto a $30 board just to get wireless seems excessive. Ditto for Ethernet: the Ethernet Shield costs around $30-$40 (or even more) and basically doubles the cost of the Arduino. The Nanode includes Ethernet (using the rather inexpensive and easy to get ENC28J60 by Microchip) and uses some small and inexpensive RF modules. While these modules are perhaps not as capable as a full Xbee implementation, their cost and benefits are much lower, and their standard deployment on the Nanode board makes them convenient to use.
• Compatibility with both shields and breadboards. Let’s face it: the Arduino Shield form factor is idiotic. Had the pins been laid out on a 0.1″ grid, you could have made shields with just ordinary 0.1″ proto board. Or, you could put pins on the bottom, and plug it directly into a standard solderless breadboard. The original design was a mistake. Let’s get over it, shall we? The Nanode does a good interim compromise: you can put headers in either position, which is awesome. But shields are already a bit of a compatibility nightmare: depending on what pins your shield uses and/or what voltages, it already may not work with a variety of seemingly compatible Arduino variants. The Nanode also wins on this case, because many of the most common shields that you would add are simply not necessary on the Nanode.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that the Nanode will kill the market for other Arduino variants and form factors. In fact, I don’t think that it should: I like the fact that I can get Arduino Nanos, Arduino Pros, and Arduino Megas, but program them all from the same environment. But I think that peripheral additions that the Nanode provides gives added value, and if the Arduino is to compete in a world where things like the Raspberry Pi exist, I think we need to figure out how to add some additional value to the Arduino platform. I thank Ken and the other Nanode users for thinking about this stuff, and taking Arduino evolution in an interesting direction.