Arduino use is exploding, thanks to its huge community

One of the best decisions we made was basing our autopilot system on Arduino (credit goes to Jordi for spotting its potential so early and selling me on it). The engineers all sniffed at it, complaining that it was just an 8-bit processor running at 16Mhz and could never compete with 32-bit ARM processors running at 70Mhz and faster. But what Jordi spotted was something more: the Atmel chips are RISC processors and very effecient, an autopilot is not actually a very computationally intensive task, and most importantly, it's not about "feeds and speeds", it's about community, which Arduino attracts by being cheap, open and very easy to use.

Arduino has won the community competition hands down. The chart above is from the latest status post, and it shows more than 750,000 monthly vistors to the website and nearly 5 million monthly page views. These figures continue to grow at 100% per year.

Community brings tens of thousands of smart people around a platform, and many hands make light work. The amount of code and libraries out there that can be used for free are staggering and there's little need to reinvent the wheel. What basing the ArduPilot line on Arduino has meant is that we're not just using a great technology platform; we're part of a movement. That means not just great tools and thousands of available developers, but also a "cool factor", that really helps with marketing and adoption. In short, the success of the Arduino revolution is thrilling to watch, not least because it means we've hitched our wagon to the right horse!

In starting stage of developing Arduino could be a good choose , but after some development became a limit.

infact the code is around up 100 kbyte now and standar Arduino UNO have only 32 kbyte of flash .. only

So now with Multipilot32 that use STM32 is possible to continue the development of AutoPilot Project on ARM M3 at 72 Mhz with 512 Kbyte of Flash and 64 kbyte ram.

Sure Arduino have a good and huge community and good Brand , the arduino core team are doing a great job :)

What was possible to do on AVR platform are doing.Is not only a problem of speed but also on the bus interface for example. So if you put more device on i2c for example it freeze ... i doing a lot of test on this limit but i cannot solve it . So in my new design i use a micro with 2 i2c bus one for ESC and other for sensor.

So really the DIYDrones developer don't use only Arduino framework to solve the problem of performance on imu , but develop a lot of good library that using directly the native code of AVR processor. Don't forget AVR Freaks community that was usefull for this years on development on AVR micro processor. http://www.avrfreaks.net

Best

Roberto

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Comments

CrashingDutchman April 7, 2011 at 4:43am

I remember Jordi showing up at the Arduino forums. I checked and in the beginning of November 2007 I found his first post. He started in Spanish and soon changed to English.
T3

Krzysztof Bosak April 6, 2011 at 7:25pm

":even though the current chips can run at 20Mhz or faster."

only the smallest AVR run that fast.
3D Robotics

Chris Anderson April 6, 2011 at 6:54pm

John Arne: what you say is true, but it's also true for many of the Arduino libraries (such as the serial and Wire libraries). That's the reason all Arduino boards still run at 16Mhz (the speed of the first Arduino boards), even though the current chips can run at 20Mhz or faster.

Long term, the move to 32 bits and an RTOS will make this codebase future-proof. Thus the importance of Roberto's work.
Moderator

Roberto Navoni April 6, 2011 at 8:29am

@Mark,

wiht standard Arduino is impossible to understand exactly where is the error ... you have the number of line in .cpp file that is the join of all pde file .. :( So is not so good for debug complex code . With Eclipse instead you have exact point of error with full description and with OpenOCD you can debug it step by step in realtime using jtag connector.
Moderator

Roberto Navoni April 6, 2011 at 8:27am

@John,

in MP32 IDE we decide to use two kind of approach Eclipse ide for professional application that support Jtag debug ,too and a standard Arduino IDE as editor with a ARM Gcc compiler that is the same used on Eclipse ide , so is possible migrate from one enviroment to the other.With Eclipse is available a ChibiOS/RT as advanced OS.

Thi is the status of task in MP32 community http://www.virtualrobotix.com/forum/topics/olimex-jtag-eclipse-openocd

Best

Roberto
Developer

Mark Colwell April 6, 2011 at 7:18am

I am stuck troubleshooting using Ardrino IDE.. Here is the error.

ArduPilotMega_2_1:-1: error: expected constructor, destructor, or type conversion before 'void'

Now how do I find which 'void' it could be in any function. Help!
Developer

John Arne Birkeland April 6, 2011 at 4:34am

As I see it, the APM is using Arduino to make it easy for a programmer to get started. And as Chris pointed out this has payed of so far. But, many of the IO and timing critical parts of the APM code, are hard coded directly for the AVR chip used. Strictly speaking this makes the code incompatible with Arduino. Considering this and that the complexity will only increase over time, It might be a good idea to start considering moving the project over to a more "grown up" IDE. If nothing else so that we at least get basic programming functionality like debugging and register/variable readouts.
Moderator

Roberto Navoni April 6, 2011 at 2:24am

In starting stage of developing Arduino could be a good choose , but after some development became a limit.

infact the code is around up 100 kbyte now and standar Arduino UNO have only 32 kbyte of flash .. only

So now with Multipilot32 that use STM32 is possible to continue the development of AutoPilot Project on ARM M3 at 72 Mhz with 512 Kbyte of Flash and 64 kbyte ram.

Sure Arduino have a good and huge community and good Brand , the arduino core team are doing a great job :)

What was possible to do on AVR platform are doing.Is not only a problem of speed but also on the bus interface for example. So if you put more device on i2c for example it freeze ... i doing a lot of test on this limit but i cannot solve it . So in my new design i use a micro with 2 i2c bus one for ESC and other for sensor.

So really the DIYDrones developer don't use only Arduino framework to solve the problem of performance on imu , but develop a lot of good library that using directly the native code of AVR processor. Don't forget AVR Freaks community that was usefull for this years on development on AVR micro processor. http://www.avrfreaks.net

Best

Roberto
Developer

John Arne Birkeland April 6, 2011 at 12:21am

The 8bit AVR is good enough and easy to use. But I would like to see a Arduino priced IMU with true EKF filtering, and that sadly is to much to handle for the 16mhz AVR.
T3

Krzysztof Bosak April 5, 2011 at 8:11pm

Exactly this is why I was amazed abotu some other autopilot claiming 140MIPS? then extra 140 MIPS for another processor just fo rthe IMU? this is something like 280.

AVR 16MHz is around 14-15.5 MIPS I estimate. So you can have as many MIPS as you want. You can have also MS Word opened on quad core 4GHz machine - the programmers become careless so easily, no matter how much you have, any processing power can be wasted easily.

Space shuttle is maybe 8x motorola 68000. But with less redundance, you could fly space shuttle on 2-3 atmegas.

1 atmega should be enough for anything less than cruise missile, if you got Engineers.

Most autopilots are RABBIT3000 which is only overmegahertzed Zilog80 with extra peripherals.

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