It would be sad if this group really is dead as this seems like a prime time for experimentation in Computer Voltage Sources. The Atom processor boards may not be the leading edge any longer, but there are plenty of new and capable parts to take their place. I'm somewhat surprised it's taken this long for Arduino to show up here as it seems to be the obvious heir to this role.
Another family of parts to consider are the STM32F3xx microcontrollers. These are 32-bit ARM Cortex M4F processors (72MHz clock, DSP and Floating Point built-in) coupled with a wide variety of capable peripherals and available at very reasonable prices (<$10 in small qty). I've been doing a bit of work with them lately and find them to be very powerful. The primary stumbling block is that they don't have a slick IDE for programming and downloading like the one for Arduino, but if you can drive the development tools you can leap far beyond what's possible with the AVR processors.
Here's a couple of web pages that describe some breakout boards I did for these devices:
http://ebrombaugh.studionebula.com/embedded/stm32f373breakout/index.htmlhttp://ebrombaugh.studionebula.com/embedded/stm32f303breakout/index.htmlEric
________________________________
From: djbrow54 <
davebr@...>
To:
ComputerVoltageSources@yahoogroups.com Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2013 5:25 PM
Subject: [ComputerVoltageSources] Arduino ComputerVoltageSource
I know this group is dead but thought I would post here anyways. I played around with an Arduino Mega 2560 and replaced the AtomPro28 processor on a four channel CVS to see what it would do. The SPI update rate for the DACs is considerably faster since the Arduino uses native hardware support in the AVR. I've only benchmarked one program between the Arduino and the AtomPro28 which was a tight loop stepping through 128 semitone CVs.
I don't know that I will go anywhere with this as I have enough programmable modules and the speed difference wasn't that compelling but it was an interesting exercise. Some details and photos on my Arduino CVS page.
http://modularsynthesis.com/arduino/arduino-cvs/arduino-cvs.htmDave
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