Microchip completes Atmel Aquisition with Controversy
Microchip has completed the merging of Atmel into their corporate structure, but some big problems have become apparent. These center around Atmel’s promises before the sale that Atmel severance packages to their employees would remain intact, when in reality this is not the case. An Atmel employee I know who shall remain anonymous fears the exodus of talent over this issue will decimate the core engineering groups inside a year. Given the usual 2-year roadmap of at least 4 die mask revisions for a part (and some parts have had *nine* revisions), this is a pretty big issue. EE Times article:
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
