Saturday, February 14, 2015

What about Arduino Due ?

Arduino Due is a 3.3V board having almost the same pin layout of the Arduino Mega.

Its ugliest drawback is that its input pins are not 5V-tolerant. If you "write" a logical 1 on a higher-rated voltage input pin, it will almost always work ("writing" 3.3V on a 5V input is safe because it is somewhat near 65-66% of the required voltage; I expect it to be catched as a logical 1 everytime; "getting" 5V on a 3.3V-rated input pin means that you probably just destroyed it - or the entire board).



Specifications are quite interesting:

- 96 kb RAM vs. 8 kb RAM: you can emulate a full "64k RAM" 8-bit era computer with 32k extra for the operating system;

- 84 MHz clocked SAM3 processor: you can emulate a full 8-bit era computer at native speed... or way faster;

- 512k flash memory: you can store not only the full emulation program, but also some "floppy disks / microdrive cartridges / tapes" as well;

- the 3.3V rail can supply 800mA current: you can add peripherals and even a small screen requiring up to 2.6 watts total.

Yes, if it had 5V-tolerant I/O pins, it would have been a great machine.

No comments:

Post a Comment