I'm planning on using and ARM Cortex chip for my new 3D printer design. And they are a lot cheaper than you would think. The STM32 flavour is especially affordable, and you can get the development board for only $10 (the STM32 Discovery series of boards, very similar in layout and size to an arduino mega). And they are nice powerful little processors . And you can develop for them with opensource toolchains, and there is tons of opensource code targeted to the arm platform already.<div>
<br></div><div>Just a thought.</div><div><br></div><div>Other than that I don't know of a "cheap" source for the arduino really... But as others mentioned here, the schematics and such are freely available for all the arduino boards. So you could build one yourself for a reasonable price most likely... Only catch is a programmer, although if your electronics skills are solid building a programmer from inexpensive parts isn't super hard either.</div>
<div><br></div><div>- Paul</div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Boris Bokowski <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bokowski@gmail.com">bokowski@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div class="im">> Alternately if you need to use arduino software, you could just get the<br>
> atmega chip and supporting hardware (crystal, caps, voltage regulator &<br>
> battery terminal if powering off batteries) and build your own board with a<br>
> protoboard from radio shack or similar. You'll also need to get a<br>
> programmer for the AVR chips which will initially cost more than the cost of<br>
> an arduino but after a few boards will save you lots of money compared to<br>
> buying an arduino for every project.<br>
> Tom<br>
<br>
</div>Not sure if this is common knowledge, but the Bus Pirate (US$30 plus<br>
shipping) can be used as an AVR programmer:<br>
<a href="http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=8&products_id=237" target="_blank">http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=8&products_id=237</a><br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
Boris<br>
</font><div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
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