A community for those who use Arduino boards, Arduino clone boards, Arduino adjacent boards, Arduino software, and anything intended to be used or that can be used with Arduino hardware and/or software. If you can connect it to an Arduino or program it with the Arduino IDE it is welcome here.
If you are thinking about buying your first Arduino or if you have one in your hand and don’t know where to begin this is the community for you.
Come and ask questions or show off your project. No one is too new or too experienced for this community.
In general, 40-year-old tech is far worse than modern chips. But the benefit of 40-year-old tech is that any old book from the last 40 years has good analysis on those designs.
At a minimum, 5V uses far more power / amperage than 3.6V, or even 1.8V designs. The 40-year-old TTL/CMOS stuff is likely through-hole as well, rather than surface mount.
But these “downsides” are purely upsides for the beginner. Large through-hole parts are easier to breadboard and experiment with. High-quality surface mounts are a pain-in-the-ass to work with as a beginner. Finally, 5V has more reliability / less noise in your analog circuit designs. So its all in all a far more forgiving environment.
But you ain’t gonna get ~150uA sleep (or less) microcontrollers on a 5V platform!! If you need low power, you gotta go to 3.6V or even 1.8V.