Recently, I’ve been thinking about tools and what to use as my preferred “platform” for this hobby I call hacking. Actually, I’ve been worrying about this since October 2011, when I first wrote the proposal for the Goldilocks, my project for building a 1284p based Arduino Uno clone.

In 2011, I had tried to build several projects utilising uIP and other IP stacks (W5100 Arduino Ethernet), and RFID and uSDCard FatFS support as some of the foundations. I found that the Arduino Uno simply didn’t allow me to do anything requiring complex libraries, because it lacked RAM resources. Because of these issues, I tried two things. Firstly, I started using the Arduino Mega platform, and I also tried to use ARM based platforms with Arduino physical compatibility (e.g. Maple, Teensy, kl25z). Also, people have commented, why not use a RaspberryPi or BeagleBone as the platform for your projects, they are cheap and 50 times more capable than the Arduino Uno.

I wasted a lot of time in 2012 looking at how to achieve what I want to learn, without actually getting much satisfaction. Each one of the noted suggestions has issues, but the key issue is always complexity. I keep on coming back to the AVR ATmega 8 bit platform as the right answer. These notes are my attempt to discuss (justify) why I think that may apply for others too.

My interest lies in working with a soldering iron (hardware) and a compiler, and understanding how software interacts with the physical world. The ability to directly and explicitly influence the state of a pin on a micro-controller, either in C language or in assembler is the point of the exercise. Being able to interact with physical devices, through low level bus protocols, such as SPI or I2C, or standards, such as servo-motor timing or TCP/IP, enables me to understand what the sensors, motors, and actuators of the world really do.

Many platforms attempt to abstract away the “complexity” of dealing with these issues, and give their users the power to achieve much more in short periods of time with high level languages such as Python, or JavaScript. These languages give their users rich platforms which can quickly integrate into web applications. That in itself is a great thing, but it is simply not what interests me.

The key advantage of the AVR ATmega platform is that the platform is absolutely mature, completely open, and is very scalable. The power of the ability to compile and link a simple C program with avr-gcc, and upload it to an AVR with avrdude (either with a bootloader, or SPI interface) cannot overstated. These tools with avr-libc make the AVR ATmega platform very easy to love, and easy to scale with.

In comparison, the ARM based platforms mentioned, as well as others I’ve not mentioned, suffer from a very fragmented approach to library availability, support from the C compiler, and proprietary approaches uploading compiled code. Specifically, each ARM platform seems to need to have its own libraries and linker scripts and, because of the nature of the ARM licencing, each platform may have different capabilities and ways of servicing its hardware interfaces. All very confusing for me at least.

So why not use a RaspberryPi or a BeagleBoard? Well whilst both of these are great platforms (which I also own and use), they are normally used with a full scale Linux based operating system. Having the systematic overhead of a Hardware Abstraction Layer, and device driver interfaces just takes away the purity of simple one machine instruction equals one physical outcome.

I guess what I’m saying that one day I’ll migrate to ARM based 32 bit systems for this kind of enjoyment, but that day is not today.