ArduinoMania

I took a photograph this afternoon of three of the boards that can be used with the PteroDAQ data acquisition system:

On the left is the Arduino Leonardo, the slowest and most expensive of the boards here. In the middle is the KL25Z, which I’ve been using in my class for a couple of years—it is the cheapest and most featureful of the boards. On the right is the Teensy 3.1 (without headers yet), which is the fastest and smallest of the supported boards.

I’m considering switching to the Teensy 3.1 for the class, despite its higher price than the KL25Z board, because adding male headers to the bottom of the board makes it possible to plug the Teensy 3.1 into a bread board, which makes for more secure wiring than running separate wires to the KL25Z board.  We don’t really need the 64 pins of the KL25Z board, we’re not mounting Arduino shields, and we’re not using the accelerometer or the touch sensor, so the main question is whether it is better to have the data-acquisition board be standalone or be inserted into a bread board. The RGB light on the KL25Z board is a nice feature for providing feedback that is missing from the other boards (which only have a single-color LED).

I’ve also thought about usefulness to the students after the course, though few of the students will go on to do anything other than PteroDAQ with the boards.  The Arduino IDE is much easier to deal with for beginners than any of the development environments for the KL25Z, and Teensyduino is pretty easy to install on top of the Arduino environment.  So if students are going to go on to do hobbyist-level programming on the boards, then an Arduino board or the Teensy 3.1 might be a better choice. Given how much more powerful the Teensy 3.1 is than the old ATMega-based Arduinos, I see no reason to recommend buying Arduino boards (though clones from China have gotten down to about $3).

Erich Styger, in a comment, mentioned that he is frustrated by the Teensy’s lack of a SWD (serial wire debug) connector, which he is used to using for debugging. Since I’m from an older generation of programmers, I don’t miss it—I’ve not used the SWD connector on the KL25Z boards (though my son has, to use the OpenSDA chip as a programmer).  For me, it is a luxury to have a serial port for getting print messages from the board—I started microprocessor programming in the days when having one or two LEDs was about all the information you got back from the board. Having debuggers like GDB was a luxury available on computers that cost thousands of dollars.

Of course, the ARM processors on the Teensy 3.1 and the FRDM KL25Z boards are very much more complicated than the old 8080A, Z80, and 6800 8-bit processors I started with, and people are writing much larger programs for them, so I can see the advantage of having a debugger. But there is a large startup cost to learning to use a debugger and setting up the complicated software development tools they expect you to use, so I’m happy recommending the very limited, but easy-to-use Arduino interface for bioengineering students who want to go a bit further.

I’m curious what my readers think about the choice between a FRDM KL25Z board and a Teensy 3.1 board for the Applied Electronics class, given that most of the students will only use the boards for that class.  What tradeoffs might I have missed?  If you were in the class, which board would you rather work with?