I’m having no luck joining the arduino website, so this makes me SO new I haven’t even downloaded the IDE yet. But I’m a fairly experienced coder (C, C++, Java, mostly) and an electronics designer, and I’m naturally always looking for inexpensive programmable MCU boards. I hadn’t been interested in arduino yet because the boards seemed too costly to try to put into products. But over the last few days I somehow became aware of some supposedly “compatible” atmega328P Nano 3.0 Controller Boards on both ebay and aliexpress.com, for less than $2, and they claim to have bootloaders. Not sure it I’m allowed t post links to sales here, but here’s one on ali-express
These are on ebay with similar prices. The question is, am I likely to be blocked by the official arduino.org IDE if I set it up and try to use it on these boards?
darrellg: https://www.arduino.cc/ is the official Arduino website. The IDE doesn’t care what board you are using, as long as the proper drivers are installed.
Yeah I can’t get that “.CC” website to work. I registered, picked a password, got an email confirm link, clicked and soon got a welcome message, but login credentials not accepted. Did the usual reset password thing, got a new password in email, it didn’t work either (still bad username or password error). I did manage to join at www.arduino.ORG. Layout isn’t as neat, but it works.
Yeah… proper drivers. Exactly my point. Some users report having to search for different USB drivers to talk to clone boards.
Official Arduino boards usually use an AVR chip with USB support (like an ATMEGA 16U2) as the USB interface. The drivers install with the IDE. Other manufacturers, including Sparkfun, typically use an FTDI USB-to-serial chip, or something similar. For those, you need to install the drivers.
Arduino is open source, hardware and software. Schematics, design files, and source, are all freely available. The only thing that is protected is the Arduino name. Anyone can make a board that uses the Arduino IDE, as long as they don’t call it an Arduino. Arduino-compatible is okay.
darrellg:
Official Arduino boards usually use an AVR chip with USB support (like an ATMEGA 16U2) as the USB interface. The drivers install with the IDE. Other manufacturers, including Sparkfun, typically use an FTDI USB-to-serial chip, or something similar. For those, you need to install the drivers.
Arduino is open source, hardware and software. Schematics, design files, and source, are all freely available. The only thing that is protected is the Arduino name. Anyone can make a board that uses the Arduino IDE, as long as they don’t call it an Arduino. Arduino-compatible is okay.
Thanks. It will be a good while before my “clone” boards arrive on their slow boat from Chine, so in the mean time I’ll start accumulating USB drivers that different folks have found useful for one board or another. Hopefully one will work. If not, I’m only paying less than $2 for each board.
My boards came today, and sadly the “official” USB drivers that came with the windows IDE won’t work with it. I know other folks have worked with clones like the ones I got on ali-express, so if anyone has any pointers on where to find drivers to get them working I’d appreciate it greatly. They weren’t a major investment, but their low cost was the only thing that made it possible for me to even try.
