Another factor is that the AVR chips are mostly still 5 volt parts. That means that they have to be made with a very out-of-date process and are much larger than current designs. (The processors used in AVR Arduinos can be run all the way down to 2V at reduced performance, but the fact that they allow 5V operation dictates the process used.) All the microcontroller ARM chips that I am familiar with are 3.3 volt chips (that's the maximum, most can also be run at lower voltages, typically down to 1.8V); higher end ARMs used in phones and the like run at even lower voltages, often less than one volt.

But... being 5 volt chips, they are easier to use in maker designs. Makers tend to still be using older 5 volt CMOS chips for glue rather than low voltage parts. Other things that they want to hook up are likely to run at 5V. 5V means that you can drive every color of LED directly with an output pin rather than needing a level shifter. Low voltage CPUs usually have less current drive capability as well, so even interfacing to other low voltage devices may require the use of buffers. 5V parts have better noise immunity and are less static sensitive.

The Arduino Due, the first ARM-based Arduino, has failed to catch on. One reason is that it is a 3.3V board with inputs that are not 5V tolerant, which means that a large percentage of existing shields and other modules that are designed to be used with Arduino won't work with it. No real fix for that other than releasing new 3.3V shields.

No, ARM isn't more expensive. Try, for example, the ST Microelectronics STM32F030R8T6. That's a Cortex-M0 ARM, 48MHz, 64K flash, 8K RAM, 55 I/O pins. $2.22 in quantity one. Reference: http://www.digikey.com/product... That's just one part I happen to be familiar with; there may be even cheaper ARM alternatives out there.

Quantity one price of an ATMega328? $3.25. That's the surface mount version; the DIP is $3.38. Reference: http://www.digikey.com/product...

It's true that if you stay with Atmel, ARM will be more expensive. The ATSAMD21G18 that is used in the upcoming Arduino Zero Pro is $6.17 in quantity one. Reference: http://www.digikey.com/product... To be fair, that is a newer design using the somewhat more powerful Cortex-M0+ core.

VisiCalc was actually developed on a MicroMind? I didn't know that!

The ECD MicroMind was a tragic example of the perfect being the enemy of the good. It was an ambitious design for the time, notably including memory mapping hardware so the system could have more than 64K RAM, and a powerful graphics board that had both bitmap graphics capability and a programmable character generator. It used stackable boards rather than the usual card slots. But they spent so much time perfecting the design and adding more bells and whistles that they never got the system to the point of being able to be mass produced at a reasonable price.

I knew the guys at the time and hung around at the fringes of the project, though I was never really involved. I think they did use the bitmap chess font I designed for it in the chess program.

The 6500 was MOS Technology's first chip, and sold for $20 in quantity one. It was designed to be pin-compatible with the 6800, though the instruction set was different so it was not a drop-in replacement. The requirement for the quadrature clock was shared with that chip, so it really wasn't any harder to use. MOS Technology withdrew the 6500 from the market under legal pressure from Motorola; MOS Technology probably would have won the legal battle but did not have the resources to fight it.

Meanwhile they had been working on their second product, the 6502. The new chip incorporated the quadrature clock generator in the CPU, so there was no longer a need to generate it externally. (Generating quadrature clocks is not all that difficult - the circuit involves two flip-flops - the main wrinkle is that they have to be non-overlapping, requiring some attention to circuit layout and stray capacitance.) The 6502 also rearranged the pins so it was no longer pin-compatible with the 6800, satisfying Motorola's lawyers. The new chip was easier to use so they raised the price a bit to $25 in quantity one.

Many modern microprocessor designs use quadrature clocks, but they are generated on-chip now just like the 6502. Any microcontroller that takes a clock input that is four times the actual clock speed of the processor uses a quadrature clock. In current designs it's harder to tell because they also often incorporate on-chip PLL clock multipliers, so the actual clock rate of the chip is many times the speed of the external clock. x86 processors are one extreme example; they use a 100 MHz external clock and may multiply it by 40x or more.

Mostly the 6502 was cheap because they made a marketing decision to make it cheap. The convention wisdom of the time was to charge through the nose for small quantities of chips and soak developers. In theory this helped companies keep down the large volume prices of their chips and make them more attractive to companies that were going to buy millions of them. MOS Technology, a startup chip maker, decided to try something radical to put itself on the map: sell single chips at prices low enough that hobbyists and garage startups could afford them. It paid off; Apple's decision to use the 6502 was largely motivated by the low price of the chip.

After MOS Technology went away, the industry returned to business as normal for many years, again charging high prices for small quantity orders and especially for evaluation boards. But that has changed in recent years. We now have a flood of inexpensive evaluation boards for all sorts of microcontrollers - not just open hardware projects like Arduino, but also boards from manufacturers such as the TI Launchpad series and the mbed. The maker movement has been a big beneficiary of the change. The software situation has also improved: we now have open-source tools based on GCC as an alternative to expensive embedded system compilers and debuggers.

The ugly comes along with the low drag coefficient. Giving up the low drag coefficient would mean less range. Of course it's also true that designing gas powered cars like that would mean better fuel mileage, so we may yet see it.

One of the nice things about an electric car is that stop and go driving doesn't hurt its range much, at least if the weather is sufficiently pleasant that you don't need to run the heater or the air conditioner. Electric cars have regenerative braking so much of the energy is recovered if you brake, and a stopped electric car uses no power at all.

One thing I haven't seen addressed in any of the news reports is whether OnLive was financially viable. If they were having trouble keeping the lights on and they couldn't find a way to make the numbers work, then I really can't blame them for taking what they could get. On the other hand, if they sold just because somebody put a bunch of money on the table to shut them down, I'm inclined to say that they should have refused the deal.

This site bills itself as news for nerds. Self respecting nerds should be familiar with the Hitchhiker's Guide and its main tropes, even if they choose not to read it.

For me, the fact that it was presented as a straight up news story was what made the post work.

Australia is not an example of a country with good internet service. One of their problems is lack of density; they have nearly the area of the US but less than a tenth of the population. Canada is in the same boat.

The countries that we hold up as shining examples of good internet service are mostly dense European countries and even denser Asian countries. The notable counterexamples are in Scandinavia, where there is a tradition of robust government-provided services.

I'm curious what technology they are using for 2 gigabit internet. You would have to bond a LOT of DOCSIS 3.0 channels (around 50, which is a third of the total number of channels on a cable system, and they would also need some for the uplink) to get that much bandwidth. So either they have some new tech that is more bandwidth efficient, or they are planning a fiber-to-the-pole deployment. In the latter case they would shift to delivering television over IP on a per-subscriber basis, so turning over so much of their cable bandwidth to internet service wouldn't be a problem.

That is about to change as the technology spreads. For example, the two $149 Chromebooks that were recently announced have dual band 802.11ac.

Thanks for posting this.

At heart this is a fight over who gets to make Arduino products. Arduino LLC is looking toward a multiple vendor future: more than one authorized manufacturer as Raspberry Pi and BeagleBoard have done, and more partner-designed products like Sparkfun's Arduino Pro and Pro Mini and Intel's Galileo. Arduino SRL wants to remain the only or primary manufacturer.

Ultimately this is a battle that Arduino SRL can't win. There are no legal barriers keeping other companies from making Arduino-compatible boards. Very inexpensive ones from China are flooding into the market, and taking a lot of business away from the official products. The only way for the official Arduino products to stay relevant is to move manufacturing to a lower cost location than Italy.

The Chinese makers have even started to make changes to the design to lower the cost of the boards. A big cost obstacle was the cost of USB interface chips. For years Arduino boards used FTDI USB-serial chips, but the price of those has remained stubbornly high - so much that the Uno moved to using a second Atmel microcontroller just for the USB-serial interface because it's cheaper than an FTDI chip. (That is almost certainly a business decision by FTDI rather than a manufacturing cost issue.) First the Chinese makers moved to using cheap FTDI clones, but FTDI fought that off by making driver changes that check for official chips. But more recently they are shifting to a Chinese-designed USB-serial chip, the CH340G, that reportedly sells for around 20 cents in volume. (The Uno and Nano have both been modified to use it.) That has made under-$5 Arduino clone boards possible, and that in turn will lead to low-volume products simply including a Nano as part of the design rather than putting those parts on the main board. The Nano clones cost less than buying the parts to make them unless you are making at least 10,000 boards.

Example: the cheapest listing for a Nano clone on banggood.com is $3.27 with free shipping from China. And that's for ONE; if you buy 100 it's $2.81. The quantity 100 price of the ATMega328 from DigiKey is $2.54; by the time you buy the USB connector, the USB-serial chip, the crystal, and the other supporting components, you're going to be over $3.27 - let alone $2.81 - and then you still have to build it.

The SlimStyle bulbs won't fit in some fixtures, but they are a good choice if they fit. The original Cree bulbs (the ones with the big heat sink at the collar) also sometimes won't fit. The new Cree bulbs (the 4Flow design) are great for most applications but are a poor choice for theater-style fixtures where the top of the bulb is facing toward the user, because the holes at the top mean that the undiffused light is coming straight at you. I also have some Sylvania LED bulbs from BJ's that seem OK but they are not dimmable.

The first LED bulb I bought was one of the weird Philips ones with the external yellow phosphor. That one is still going strong but I haven't bought any more of them; they never got cheap and the look of them is odd if the bulb is going to be visible.

I did have one Cree bulb fail recently. Now I get to find out if the warranty is actually worth anything.

$20 is an exaggeration. But the really low prices that a lot of us are seeing (under $5/bulb) include some hidden subsidies from utility companies. So do CFL prices, so this is nothing new.

Maybe, maybe not. If he's a developer doing serious work from home, he could easily run up a $1000/month bill at those rates, not to mention that the wireless service at that location is likely to be slow and unreliable.