[Lab] arduino hardware

[Paul (Maker Engineering)]

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.

Just a thought.

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.

- Paul

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Boris Bokowski <bokowski at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Alternately if you need to use arduino software, you could just get the
> > atmega chip and supporting hardware (crystal, caps, voltage regulator &
> > battery terminal if powering off batteries) and build your own board with
> a
> > protoboard from radio shack or similar.  You'll also need to get a
> > programmer for the AVR chips which will initially cost more than the cost
> of
> > an arduino but after a few boards will save you lots of money compared to
> > buying an arduino for every project.
> > Tom
>
> Not sure if this is common knowledge, but the Bus Pirate (US$30 plus
> shipping) can be used as an AVR programmer:
>
> http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=8&products_id=237
>
> Boris
>
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