Imp vs Arduino functionalities

Hardware
1

Hi,

I have been experimenting with Imp and reading about Arduino around the same time and it appears there is a high overlap of the pin functionalities and wanted to check if there is any pin feature in imp that is not there in Arduino and vice versa.

Thanks

2

There are so many differences between the products, I would consider the pin functions to be a more minor consideration until you know exactly what you need.

that said,

  • imp has a DAC and the Arduino has none.
  • Arduino ( or at least the underlying Atmel chip) can do a hardware counter that runs in the background and imp only has a counter that blocks all other activity while it counts.
  • imp has configurable pull-down resistors on GPIO and Arduino does not

this is not a comprehensive list of the differences.

you didn’t ask about this, but the imp is far easier to program. I am using both in my current project.

3

The counter actually is implemented in hardware and could run in the background, we just don’t have that implemented as yet.

Other differences:

  • imp has loads of UARTs. Standard arduino has just one HW uart.
  • imp has two i2c’s, two spi’s
  • imp has configurable pull-ups and pull-downs
  • imp has other stuff which hasn’t been exposed yet :slight_smile:
4

Thanks for the clarification - as a newbie to electronics, I stumbled upon electric imp couple of weeks ago and have been very fascinated by the possibilites. The above responses gives me the confidence to focus my energies on a single platform