[sdiy] REVIEW: Beat707 Arduino Drum Sequencer

[Gordon JC Pearce]

On Sun, 2011-05-22 at 12:43 +0200, Olivier Gillet wrote:
> > 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.

Right, but for an experimental project an Arduino is just fine.  Maybe
people want to stack their Beat707 board on top of other shields, to do
something that you haven't thought of yet.

> 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

Yeah, but breadboards are a waste of time.  How well do you think 16MHz
clock oscillators work with 100pF of capacitance between "tracks"?

> 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.

I've got an ICSP cable.  I don't use it, because it's inconvenient and
no faster than the serial bootloader.  Why bother with it, when I can
use the serial USB cable I'm already using to send the 32kBytes of code
in a couple of seconds?  Not to mention that it's another thing to
remember to bring with me, or forget to pick up when I'm finished and
leave in the workshop over the weekend.

Gordon MM0YEQ