Arduino Due vs Arbotix vs Axon2

[metal]

I would know, which controller did you give a chance? Is the new Adruino Due better then the Arbotix?

I say (in my mind) the arbotix have a bigger community then the Axon2. But the Axon 2 have more Features.

[KurtEck]

I personally have played with many different controllers...

But it is always harder to say what is better, usually depends on your needs and constraints!

You did not mention them, but I have also used (played with) many different variations of Arduino/Arduino compatible boards: Uno, Leonardo, Mega, Fio, Seeeduino Mega, Lynxmotion Botboarduino, Basic Micros DaVinci.... All have pluses and minuses.

I have used an Axon2 which is a nice board. Pluses: Has power buss, with 3 pin headers, 4 USarts, 3 16 bit timers, some feedback stuff like a one character display... Downside not Arduino compatible, Uses different USB chip, which used to be a pain to program with 64bit OS...

Arduino Due: Performance wise, will kick the rear ends of the two other boards mentioned, but it is a 3.3v processor that is not 5v tolerant so will be interesting to see how that works out with shields and other devices that you may wish to use with it. Also the IDE for it is now just in beta, not sure how many of the standard (let alone 3rd party) libraries have been tested and/or converted to the different processor. I would like to try this one out soon. Another downside is there may be a larger learning curve to get this up and running...

Arbotix: Nice board, has more memory than standard Arduino 64K versus 32K for Arduino, 2 USARTS, It's main plus is that if you are using Robotis AX-12 or AX-18 servos it has connectors on board, plus I believe it has support for two motors on the board as well... Downside, is that the board is not a native Arduino board and you must do some stuff, like copy some directories and libraries in to special locations to make it work. For me not a major issue, for others yes... Also due to this, there is sometimes a lag between when a new Arduino IDE is released and when the libraries associated with this board are made compatible with it.

Also not mentioned: There are several Pic32mx boards such as Chipkit Max32/Uno32 which have the performance like I suspect the Due has, is also 3.3v but most IO pins are 5v tolerant. They have their own version of the Arduino IDE (MPIDE), that you can also use to program standard Arduinos as well as many different Pic32MX based boards, but they are still back at the Arduino 0023 build compatibility... Now that Arduino is going to release an IDE that supports builds for several chip types, it will be interesting to see if these two IDEs merge...

Raspberry PI: Have one on order, thought it would be fun to experiment with, but not sure how easy it will be to have it actually get inputs from sensors or have it directly drive Servos or motors.

Which would I choose? depends. Assuming that I can modify my Arduino Mega shield to work with the Due, such that I can connect up servos and some sensors... I know that this is the next board I would like to experiment on with one of my Hex robots!

Kurt

[jwatte]

The Raspberry Pi is lower cost and has more performance than the Due. Its main draw-back is lack of shield compatibility. It, like the Due, is not 5V tolerant. Also, it doesn't give you much power to play with, as it's USB powered.

There's a 5V tolerant I/O board (based on an AVR chip) called the Gertboard, which has a bunch of relays, some motor driver, etc. RPi + Gertboard costs more than the Due, though.

With a low-cost shield adaptor for the RPi, the community would probably come up with Arduino IDE emulation pretty quickly, and at that point, I think the RPi would be the winner for many things. One draw-back is that it is desktop OS based, and thus is not fully real-time, though.

Full circle: attach the RPi to an AVR on a board that drives shields, and the IDE just uploads to the AVR...