Society of Robots - Robot Forum
Electronics => Electronics => Topic started by: tralfam on March 04, 2009, 04:06:35 PM
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I've heard a lot about ARM but I am still not sure what it is exactly that makes it better than AVR - which I like. Can someone briefly summarize the main advantages/disadvantages for use in robotics between these two.
Thanks.
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Mate....
ARM is used mainly as processor... they analyze signals and all that stuff... (Even playing MPEG at little LCDs)
but they aren't microcontroller... meaning that they have no good IO capabilities....
It's kinda, where you use all that stuff....
An ARM is bad, if you want to replace the 50$ robot... but it's good if you want to make a data analyzer....
or do trig functions, or inverse trig functions.... or do decoding....
An AVR.... is good for practical stuff, as getting the measurements, doing PWM, generating various signals.....
But if you want a good answer, then it's only that an AVR is a mule, and a ARM is a brain...
They are totally different things....
There are some thingies trying to do both, like the ATXMEGA and the dsPIC.... they are truly in the middle...
But they haven't been relished to market until now...
Regards, Lefteris
Greece
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I've heard a lot about ARM but I am still not sure what it is exactly that makes it better than AVR - which I like. Can someone briefly summarize the main advantages/disadvantages for use in robotics between these two.
Thanks.
It's hard to compare ARM to AVR.
I assume you are talking about AVR8. ARM is a 32bits processor, the AVR8 is 8bits. I won't get into details (PM me if you want to know more) but basically an ARM is closer to a desktop computer. It can run a complete OS (linux and probably windows CE) and has a lot of processing power, compared to the AVR8 which is limited (memory space, processing power, ...). A LOT of embedded systems (cellphones, mp3 players, ebooks...) are based on ARM.
If you are talking about AVR32, then it's a different architecture, closer to the ARM. I don't know much about it though. BTW, if any of you know about an AVR32 dev board at a descent price, let me know, I'm curious.
Chelmi
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Ahh, I see. I was thinking that ARM was more of a direct competitor to AVR, which lead to a lot of confusion.
Thanks guys!
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BTW, if any of you know about an AVR32 dev board at a descent price, let me know, I'm curious.
Why aren't STK1000 cheap?????? :D :D :D :D :D :D
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ARM - another great British invention.
The first ARM RISC based home computer was the Acorn Archimedes which followed the well loved Acorn BBC (never really got to the US-your loss!).
ARM stands for 'Acorn Risc Machine' - a British Cambridge brand
Acorn then went on to develop hardware, especially RISC processors, that are used by most mobile phones today.
http://atterer.net/acorn.htm (http://atterer.net/acorn.htm)
ARM vs AVR = they are very different things
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You will find ARMs with most of the peripherals that are included on low end microcontrollers. you get them with I2C, A2D, PWM etc... some even have more features such as DAC outputs and external memory controllers built in. Youve just got to look for them.
Think like this, ARMs are being used in lots of devices now such as mp3 players and recorders. they are a standalone computer so they need DAC's and pwm to produce the sounds. they need the gpio for the screen, they need a2d or ccp in some cases for recording. They are a next step from low end controllers, it just gets difficult to prototype with them
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So, what really halt us is a protoboard after all....
Due to my luck this time of the year on this thing...
I totally agree with you...
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So, what really halt us is a protoboard after all....
Due to my luck this time of the year on this thing...
I totally agree with you...
That is another thing I have heard, development tools for ARM are expensive. How true is this?
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You can get a dev board for <$100
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Try $50 -
http://www.embeddedartists.com/products/boards/ (http://www.embeddedartists.com/products/boards/)
The GNU GCC compiler toolchain is free. We used the NXP LPC2106 (ARM7) with GNU tools very successfully for our first generation robot.