Matrix user forums

hi all hope this is in the relevant section,
so, my question is this although I'm fairly new to all this programming I would like to know why there seems to be so much Arduino hardware out there, with the relatively small amount of programming ive done, ive always used PIC microcontrollers to gain both programming and hardware experience but when I search for pic equivalent boards similar to the Arduino pretty much all I come up with is the matrix ecio units, is Arduino more popular, is it easier to program, is it more powerfull ?? I would appreciate any insight to one being better than the other, their merits or weaknesses,

cheers bob

Hi Bob,

Arduino seemed to catch the attention of the maker movement thanks to the open source nature and a lot of things came together at once to really boost it up (Thingiverse / Instructables to name two). A lot of people then made Arduino compatible boards to jump on the bandwagon. Eventually China got their hands on the open source designs and really dropped the floor in terms of cost which further added popularity. Raspberry Pi was another key contributor to the Maker Movement. Annoyingly ECIO came out well before Arduino but did not have the same market changing effect due to several factors.

Arduino or AVR has a very nice and free C compiler which is another reason Arduino did so well. Allegedly Arduino originally wanted to use PIC over AVR but there was no free compiler for them to use so their hands were tied.

AVRs are generally more expensive than PICs but have the advantage of running at 4x the speed of a compatible PIC device at the same crystal speed. PICs on the other hand have a specially designed architecture to simplify assembly coding. Assembly coding on an AVR is significantly more effort. This is another of the reasons that AVR C compiler is free but PIC is not, PIC is not a standard architecture device. PICs are probably much more heavily used in industry than AVR.

Digilent have had some success with PIC32 boards in the Arduino footprint named ChipKit.

All in all it's all about what you're more familiar with. Both should work fine with Flowcode but in my opinion AVR tends to have more gotchas and strange quirks. For example using SPI on an AVR, if you leave the SS pin as an input and the input is allowed to read low then this can lock up the SPI hardware and the users program, PICs do not have this problem. Another peculiarity is that on some AVR registers to clear a bit you have to write a 1, again another gotcha that you wouldn't assume would happen.

thanks for the reply benj, so as you say stick with what I'm familiar with, although I do think an ECIO may be worth getting for further prototyping/learning

The ECIO40P16 is a beast and will kick the pants of any AVR based Arduino.

Benj wrote:The ECIO40P16 is a beast and will kick the pants of any AVR based Arduino.

That is for sure

are you slightly biased benj lol I will look into the ECIO thanks

bob

Only slightly

Hi, I am new to programming but have an interest in Arduino Uno and associated shields for use with some IOT apps that allow you control your home heating remotely, lights, etc, etc.

As I am used to flowcharts, I came across Flowcode when doing a search for Arduino related flow charts, to try and get a handle on the structure of the programming and how it is used. I plan to stick with Arduino Uno for now due to the very cheap cost of associated products from China, until such time as I need to move on to more expensive products.

I am aware of the Matrix E-blocks, but plan to stick with the Arduino products that I have already purchased for now, at least until I have the basics covered and am happy with such things as reading Electricity usage, storing data in datalogger shield and accessing stored data via IOT app on mobile phone. I have already ordered a Wemos D1 R2 board which I believe is the same as the Arduino Uno but has WIFI on board - yet to receive new board and try ans setup WIFI link.

My first question is can I use Flowcode to do up Arduino sketches, test them offline and then upload sketch to Arduino chip, or do I need to have the E-blocks to test the Arduino hardware?

Thx.

Hello,

My first question is can I use Flowcode to do up Arduino sketches, test them offline and then upload sketch to Arduino chip, or do I need to have the E-blocks to test the Arduino hardware?

You can use Flowcode to create programs for an Arduino and other Arduino shield type hardware. There is no mandatory requirement to use E-blocks.