I think this is my final Arduino entry. I finished implementing and testing using two solenoid wing boards using an Arduino nano, and everything is working as it should. I didn’t implement any of the serial communications mostly because I stopped understanding what I was gaining using the Arduino nano platform.
I chose the nano because of the price and it was approximately the same cost per pin as the PSOC 4200. The PSOC is $4 an has 36 I/Os, and the Nano is about $2 and only has 16ish usable I/Os. The PSOC is a much more powerful processor, so I was losing some performance there.
The one nice thing is that the Arduino has the super easy hardware abstraction layer (HAL) which makes it rather simple to program. The problem was that every time that I used the HAL, the performance was atrocious because I didn’t like the decisions that were made to make it simple. There are a ton of busy waits which makes programming easier, but it reduces the processor usefulness even further. To get true real time performance I ended up bare metal programming the processor. That meant that I really wasn’t using the Arduino platform at all, but I was just coding another inexpensive processor.
So then there are the pinout choices that the Arduino made. It was very difficult to get a group of eight useful pins in a row which meant making very small wing cards work properly was a pain in the butt. The Atmel choice to not make all of the analog inputs to be used as digital I/O further complicated the code. (Atmel has said they will fix this in the next version of the chip). While coding, I had to keep a map of the pins sitting beside me because the pinout was not logical.
All in all, I just don’t see what I was gaining. That’s why I’m ending it. The price difference was not sufficient to make it worth all the extra work. The performance was significantly lower. I enjoyed playing with the Arduinos, but at this point, I’m at been there, done that, stage.
Open Pinball Project 