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Frequently Asked Questions

I thought Arduino™ was slow​

Arduino™ has a reputation for being slow, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Fundamentally Arduino compiles C / C++ code which can be written to be very efficient. Arduino code is often slow because:

  • Functions are written to have compatibility across diverse hardware at the expense of speed.
  • Many Arduinos use basic 8-bit micro-controllers running at low (~10MHz) speeds.
  • Interfaces to external components such as ADC and DAC often use slow protocols like I2C and/or waste processor time waiting and polling for communications operation to complete.

The Quarto avoids all of these limitations. We wrote our own functions, optimized for speed, for everything that is time-critical. The Quarto runs on an ARM M7 processor running at over 500 MHz. All the communication to the ADC and DAC has been off-loaded to the FPGA.