[sdiy] REVIEW: Beat707 Arduino Drum Sequencer

[Olivier Gillet]

> I'm curious as to why anyone would go to the trouble and expense of
> buying an ATMega 328, flashing STK500 into it, getting a crystal, making
> a board, and finding some sort of USB-to-serial bridge when you can buy
> an Arduino for a tenner.

Because at some point, you might find yourself in the position of
selling a product, and then you'd rather put those $5 of parts on your
board (you won't escape having to design your own board anyway), than
require your customers to purchase an arduino board from a third party
supplier. Not to mention the freedom it gives you in terms of form
factor and housing (stacking anything on top of an arduino means an
extra 1cm of height). It would be interesting to hear why the Beat707
guys did not do this.

But yeah for prototyping, or just having fun messing around, it might
be more convenient to use arduinos. On projects using plenty of I/O,
though, some people might prefer putting an ATMega on a breadboard or
a perfboard, rather than having a mess of cables popping from an
arduino to the rest of the circuit. As for the programming part, once
you've used an ISP programmer at full speed you won't turn back to the
sluggish serial bootloader ; especially with the larger capacity AVRs.

Olivier