ArduinoMania

In one day my son and I added support for the Teensy 3.1 board to the PteroDAQ data acquisition system that previously supported the Freedom KL25Z board and the ATMega-based Arduino boards.

We ended up using the Teensyduino development system, but really only for the downloading and for the usb-serial library, since the K20 ARM chip on the Teensy 3.1 is quite similar to the KL25 that we originally based things on.

The Teensy 3.1 is a lot easier to install the software on than the Freedom boards, and runs a little faster (72MHz instead of 48MHz), but has essentially the same ADC.  Actually, it has 2 analog-to-digital converters, but most of the pins can only be read by ADC0, so we’ve not set up ADC1 to read anything but the internal 1.2V Vref (which is conveniently provided as an output on the AREF pin).  We had originally planned to use just ADC0, but the code for reading the Vref signal on ADC0 never worked—I suspect an error in the reference manual, since changing to reading Vref with ADC1 worked fine.

The Freedom boards are cheaper, are easier to unplug the USB cables from, can deliver more power at 3.3V, have RGB LED, and have a lot of neat features missing from the Teensy boards, but the Teensy boards can be configured to plug directly into a bread board (if you give up a lot of the connections and just use 26 pins), and have more RAM (so can run for longer at high sampling rates before the buffer overflows).

I’m going to have to rewrite part of my book to talk about the possibility of using the Teensy 3.1, and I’ll have to decide whether the extra $6–$7 is worth the simpler setup for my Applied Electronics lab course. We’d sacrifice being able to get much power from the board (probably only about 100mA instead of 500mA at 3.3V), but that is a relatively minor loss, since we have bench power supplies at every station.

I’m not sure what I’ll recommend in the book for people trying to learn on their own—I’ll probably have to play with the Teensy a bit to see how useful it is.  I have at least one other program that the students have been using in the lab (the frequency detector for turning a relaxation oscillator into a touch sensor) that I’ll have to port to Arduinos and the Teensy 3.1.

For home hobbyists who aren’t planning to dive deep into embedded-system programming, the Teensyduino IDE is a lot friendlier than the MBED.ORG tools (and I hear that the Kinetis SDK has a very, very large learning curve), so it might be a better board despite the lack of peripherals (no accelerometer, RGB LED, or capacitive touch slider).