"Yesterday we introduced many development boards including Arduino. Today we continue the introduction of the second half of the development board. It also includes high-end goods such as FPGA.
NETDUINO
Netduino also adopts the shape of Arduino. Different from the development board based on 8-bit or 16 bit microcontroller we have seen before, it is based on arm
Cortex's netduino is built using a 32-bit stm32fx microcontroller.
The operating system of the development board is. Net micro framework. These development boards are compiled with C and can be directly compiled with Microsoft Visual c# express
2010 compilation, which makes it very powerful and flexible. Due to some support for OS X and Linux, c developers are not completely ignored on non windows platforms.
parallax propeller
Compared with other microcontrollers on the market, this is an interesting alternative chip. The others are basically single core, but the propeller has eight.
This means that eight independent processes can run simultaneously, monitoring and responding to sensors or other inputs. Think of eight Arduino loop functions that run simultaneously.
Depending on your application, running parallel processors is more powerful than using interrupts, and the $50 price is not much more expensive than the other microcontroller development boards we talked about.
According to your different needs, propeller has a variety of styles (including dip and SMT packaging). Like other manufacturers, let parallelax adopt Arduino style to adapt to parallelax
Propeller ASC + development board
Shrinking derivative board
As mentioned earlier, Arduino's success has also led to the launch of numerous replication and compatible development boards. KickStarter, a crowdfunding website, displays some amazing successful works, which are too many to list one by one, but some are very representative because of their size.
For example, tinyduino, as an Arduino compatible microcontroller, uses and Arduino
Uno same processor. But only a quarter of the size, the main processor of the development board includes microcontroller and support circuit., USB and DC power regulators have been combined with shields. If you don't need them in your project, you don't need to install them. Because of its size, or more likely because tinyduino's main processor board costs $20, but if you need to add a USB/
ICP programmable shield, plus $18. So this tinyduino is not cheap.
DigiSpark
Digispark is another small Arduino compatible board based on attiny85 microcontroller. This makes its computing power inferior to tinyduino. It has only six I / O ports, but it costs only $9. Like tinyduino, it also has some interesting shield packages that can easily expand other functions.
Prospect of wireless
Earth shaking changes are taking place in the field of microcontrollers, and everything is developing towards wireless. Arduino
The shields of its compatible board are equipped with GSM cellular, WiFi, low-power Bluetooth and other wireless functions.
WIFI
At the Maker Faire held in the bay area earlier, Massimo Banzi claimed that its Arduino
Y ú n is the first embedded Linux development board named after Arduino, and it also integrates WiFi module.
This development board is basically an Arduino
Leonardo uses atmega32u4 microprocessor, and an embedded ar9331 processor runs MIPs, a branch of openwrt
A variant of Linux, you can program it wirelessly or by connecting USB. At the same time, they may cooperate with temboo to get twitter, Facebook, foursquare,
FedEx, paypal and other companies use one-stop APIs to access data.
Considering that this board is bundled with an embedded Linux development board, Arduino and a WiFi dongle or shield, the price of $69 is not very expensive.
Low power Bluetooth (ble)
The advent of ble has changed the playing method of wireless technology for embedded devices. It solves many problems in the old standard. The new ble protocol is easy to work with "classic" Bluetooth. Although some smartphones, including the iPhone, have been using ble for some time, manufacturers' support is not enough. About half a year ago, ble from redbearlab
Shield and ble Mini development boards began to ship. Now we see that Arduino compatible development boards also integrate ble.
Among the recent KickStarter projects, bledino and rfduino are the most discussed.
Interestingly, both boards are small, which indicates their use.
Mesh network
If your wireless network needs to cover most areas, mesh network is an ideal solution. Each development board communicates with adjacent boards and transmits data packets from the ad-hoc network to the edge, where there is a router or gateway connected to the wider world and the Internet.
Another great success on KickStarter is inoccio, an Arduino compatible development board with built-in 802.15.4-Based mesh network and lithium polymer battery, and Wi Fi function through shield. It seems that it can easily build an ideal platform for distributed sensor networks.
GSM Geogram
One is an Arduino compatible development board, which can be applied to tracking products. It has GSM cellular modulation and demodulation and an on-board GPS receiver, which is also an Arduino with great flexibility.
The raspberry pie arrived at the invitation
Before raspberry pie, single board Linux computers already existed. I used gumstix about ten years ago. However, recently, the emergence of raspberry pie overturned the whole market. Like Arduino, it will detonate a new round of competition among potential competitors.
Unlike Arduino, raspberry pie has never been a platform for makers, but the price of $35 seems to create a huge market for single board computers in one page, which is in short supply in the months after its release.
The original design intention of raspberry school is to be a cheap educational tool and make it a good assistant for students to learn programming.
Unexpectedly, thousands of DIY projects are built based on this development board. Like Arduino, the thriving community has brought infinite impetus to the development of raspberry pie.
BEAGLEBONE
Ti's beaglebone is rich in sensors, powerful processors and related electronic accessories. Coupled with its natural pride for makers, the price of beaglebone is as high as $89, but it is also warmly welcomed by the market.
But compared with raspberry pie, its price has more or less affected its sales. Of course, beaglebone has no rival in some small and specialized projects, and even raspberry pie can't shake it.
BeagleBone
The arrival of black changed all this. In addition to the new colors, the new development board looks like it wants to die; It is very similar to the previous beaglebone and has a similar layout. On other interesting new features, beaglebone
Black moves the operating system from the SD card to the on-board flash memory, freeing the microSD card slot for other purposes.
Most importantly, the price of beaglebone black dropped from $89 to $45, which is the real competition with the retail price of raspberry pie of $35. Especially when you think about beaglebone
Black has better specifications, greater flexibility and better user experience. So raspberry pie needs to be considered more.
PCDUINO
You can write code directly on this board as if it were an Arduino, and then run it directly on the board.
Sparkfun even puts the adapter with the team to make it compatible with Arduino board pins. At $60, this is an attractive option.
X86 return stroke
Generally speaking, single board computers running Linux generally use ARM processors, but recently, development boards using x86 have gradually appeared, and the most famous one is believed to be amd gizmo.
This is basically a single board laptop. The speed of gizmo is amazing, very flexible and very powerful. I believe this is the future standard from the MCU world. But performance comes at a price-
The price of $200 is really not cheap.
Hybrid development board
At present, a development board combines a single board computer such as raspberry pie with a microcontroller such as Arduino
Want to solve all the needs of users. Except Arduino
Besides y ú n, udoo also achieved great success on KickStarter. Like raspberry pie, this is also an arm based Linux development board with an impressive dual core or four core arm
Cortex-a9 processor and another second choice processor, arm's sam3x, are priced at $130 in line with its performance due to its imitation of Arduino.
wearable devices
Around 2007, the wearable microprocessor was synonymous with lilypad Arduino, an electronic module system built by Leah buechley.
2012, adafruit
Industries launched flora, the main competitor of lilypad. Although flora is designed more like a beginner's development board, the two platforms are still closely connected. Adafruit promises that its smaller second-generation wearable development board will be launched later this year, and the wearable trial market is approaching the date of outbreak after years of brewing.
FPGA
FPGA represents a new development board. Like microcontroller, FPGA can be controlled by software with the help of program on chip. With the help of FPGA, you open a new space and build an FPGA like designing a hardware chip. Before you burn the software, the FPGA has no processing power.
This sounds crazy, but it gives you flexibility. If you need more than one serial port, you just need to add it to your chip design, which means you can write a program to design a processor. Many companies, such as Intel, use FPGAs to build their chips.
Papilio of gadget factory is an open source FPGA development board for enthusiasts and entrants, which is based on FPGA chip Spartan 3
The development board has 48 I / OS and two Arduino compatible software processors, which can be loaded into the array at any time, so you can use Arduino
Build and run ide quickly. The entry-level price is $38, making it the perfect choice for FPGA development boards. The powerful Papilio based on Spartan 6 chip
Pro (priced at $85) or embedded micro mojo development board (priced at $75) is equipped with 84 I / OS, 8 analog inputs and 9 on-board LEDs.
New opportunities
For many years, there has been a phenomenon among programmers that their first formal applications were basically twitter clients, while before twitter appeared, their first applications were basically in text editors. Why? Everyone used to use a text editor, and then everyone used a twitter client, so everyone was interested in the way they worked. In the existing scheme, the buttons are no longer in the so-called correct position or process, so everyone only writes their own to solve their own problems.
I think that's what happened on KickStarter. Arduino compatible development boards are growing rapidly. Everyone uses Arduino, but everyone uses it differently. Therefore, as their first "formal" hardware project, they decided to build their own version of the development board from scratch.
I fully believe that many development boards here will disappear in the short term. Similarly, most new twitter clients will soon disappear: the cost of supporting them will greatly exceed the revenue they generate.
But in the open source world, many serious people start writing text editors or twitter clients. Like them, many fledgling manufacturers are likely to continue to do more interesting things instead of designing Arduino derivatives.
In the field of circuit, the gap between concept and production prototype is narrowing, and it is difficult to predict what will happen next. But I think the popularity and proliferation of wireless microcontrollers give people a great hint.
Everyday items have become smarter. In ten years, everything you wear and everything you take will be measured, weighed and calculated. At that time, the world will be full of sensors, and these sensors need to communicate with each other.
So which development board should I choose?
Because of the development of their open source community, if you need an 8-bit microcontroller, I will not hesitate to recommend Arduino, or if you need a single board computer running Linux, raspberry pie will be your right choice.
If you prefer raspberry pie but worry that it may not be suitable for your application, the decision becomes more complex. Unlike Arduino, raspberry pie has not yet become an unstoppable force or an immovable object. At the same price, the strongest competitor is beaglebone
Black。 On the other hand, because beaglebone black is relatively new and its community is much smaller, you may not be able to solve all the problems you encounter.
If you prefer an Arduino but have special needs (such as wireless connection), then this is not suitable for out of the box, so you should probably look at many derivatives of Arduino first. You may find that the functionality you want is integrated in one of them.
Finally, if your project's I / O requirements are not high, you might as well seriously consider ti's MSP430
Launchpad. Low price, low power consumption, and user-friendly development environment
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