To begin with an embedded development, we'd like a couple of important points with us, that are development board and an IDE (Integrated Development Environment). A microcontroller development board is really a printed circuit board (PCB) having circuitry and hardware created to support experimentation with a specific microcontroller boards capabilities. The Development boards are put together with a processor, memory, chipset and on-board peripherals such as LCD, Keypad, USB, serial port, ADC, RTC, Motor Driver ICs, SD card slot, Ethernet, etc. having debugging features. This can help save us from accidental bad connections with jumper wires and the board.
The Technical specs of Microcontroller Boards are bus type, processor type, memory, number of ports, port type, and operating system. These are generally accustomed to examine programs for embedded equipment for example various controllers, home appliances, robots, point-of-sale (PoS) terminals, kiosks and also the precise product information devices. In this article, we are going to talk about on the characteristic concerning diverse development boards all over the world. All of these has distinct individual characteristics and also a few downsides, and some development systems tend to be well known for several projects than others.
A Microcontroller Board
The microcontroller development board also referred to as Single board microcontroller. These days it is rather basic inexpensive to create a single board microcontroller development kit. Thus numerous open source softwares (IDEs) are on the market to develop a microcontroller boards so that you can develop a real-time application. Here we explore Different Microcontroller Boards as you can purchase such as
DIY based Microcontroller Boards
DIY (Do It Yourself) based microcontroller boards could be constructed in your own home by yourself, for which you will need all specific electronic and electrical components such as microcontroller (Atmel, ARM, MSP etc.), component base and additional peripherals for instance RTC, serial ports, LCD module, keyboard, touchpad etc. Now each one of these elements needs to be meticulously soldered on the PCB. Following the completion of the hardware setup, we need to decide on a appropriate IDE for programming the microcontroller to create a required application.
Applications of Microcontroller Boards
Here, i'm providing some 8051 family centered DIY applications. 8051 microcontroller is a general purpose controller, which is often used to build basic programs for example Data acquisition systems, automatic light intensity control system, industrial temperature control systems etc.
Arduino UNO
Arduino is among the most well-known open-source electronics prototyping platform to build interactive electronic applications. The Arduino UNO board includes every little thing necessary to support the microcontroller. The Arduino UNO microcontroller board is quite well known to overall newbies and professionals. It can be regarded as major microcontroller based development boards. The Arduino UNO R3 is most basic and the most robust prototyping environment in line with the ATmega328P microcontroller.
Technical Features
Microcontroller: ATmega328P
32 KB of Flash memory
Operating Voltage: 5V
Input Voltage (recommended): 7-12V
Input Voltage (limits): 6-20V
Digital I/O Pins: 14 (6 pins provide PWM output)
Analog Input Pins: 6
DC Current per I/O Pin: 40 mA
DC Current for 3.3V Pin: 50 mA.
The reason behind its recognition is, it offers an open source IDE to create sketches, using a straightforward syntax based on ‘C’ language, the program code is not hard to learn. Besides Arduino UNO we have various kinds of Arduino boards shown below:
Applications of Arduino UNO Board
Among the finest features of Arduino UNO, it offers analog I/O pins. It makes use of atmega328 and it's also really easy to program by employing predetermined libraries and functions of ArduinoIDE which happens to be open sourced. In this article, you will find a number of applications produced by utilizing ARDUINO UNO
Arduino based RFID Sensed Device Access
Arduino based Industrial Appliances Control System by Decoding Dual Tone Multi-Frequency Signals via GSM Network
Arduino based Underground Cable Fault Detection
Arduino based Home Automation
Raspberry Pi Development Board
The raspberry pi Development Board is tiny (being a scale a credit card computer. The raspberry pi could be effortlessly connected in to monitor, computer or your own TV. Additionally, it makes use of standard keyboard and mouse. Perhaps even a non-technical consumers could depend on it for establishing their own digital media devices and monitoring cameras. Raspberry Pi 3 is undoubtedly one of the most reasonably priced and impressive computing system. The recently released Raspberry Pi 3 features
Processor: 1.2GHz, 64-bit quad-core ARMv8 CPU
1) 802.11n Wireless LAN
2) Bluetooth 4.1
3) Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
4) 1GB RAM
5) 4 USB ports
6) 40 GPIO pins
7) Full HDMI port
8) Combined 3.5mm audio jack and composite video
9) Camera interface (CSI)
10) Display interface (DSI)
11) Micro SD card slot
12) videoCore IV 3D graphics core
13) Raspberry Pi Development Board
14) Raspberry Pi Development Board
15) Software Capability
Raspberry Pi operates on personalized Debian Linux known as Raspbian, to setup various packages such as Node.js, Java, the LAMP stack, Python and even more.
Applications of raspberry pi development board
Using the raspberry pi board, you can create a small personal computer. It is extremely helpful for students. We are able to establish weight wed server, mainly because it supports just about all programming languages like HTML, JAVA. It could possibly even deal with WordPress, so that you can manage your personal blogs/website. The raspberry pi board based robotics have plenty of applications in task automation industrial sectors. it is extremely straightforward to create IOT applications applying raspberry pi.
The BeagleBone Black Development Board
The BeagleBone Black is another well-known open source computer,. Today it comes with built-in wireless networking functionality. By developing a collaboration with Octavo Systems and fashioned in CadSoft Eagle, BeagleBone Black Wireless becomes the simplest to use and customize credit-card sized IoT Linux computer on the market. BeagleBone Black is really a cheap, community-supported development platform for embedded program developers. Booting time to install Linux requires TEN seconds and get started on development in under 5 minutes using only a sole USB cable.
BeagleBone Black Development Board Characteristics
1) Processor: AM335x 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8
2) 512MB DDR3 RAM
3) 2GB 8-bit eMMC on-board flash storage
4) NEON floating-point accelerator
5) 2x PRU 32-bit microcontrollers
6) 3Dgraphics accelerator
Connectivity
1) USB client for power & communications
2) USB host and Ethernet adapter
3) HDMI and 2x 46 pin headers
Software Compatibility
1) Linux
2) Android
3) Ubuntu
4) Cloud9 IDE on Node.jsw/ Bone Script library
AdaFruit Flora Development Board
The primary purpose of the Adafruit Flora development board is to develop a wearable electronic appliances. The new disk shape, sewable, Arduino-compatible microcontroller built to create incredible wearable initiatives. The most recent edition of Adafruit Flora includes a micro-USB and Neopixel LEDs for effortless programmability and testing.
AdaFruit Flora Development Board
Features
Atmega32u4 microcontroller, which powers Arduino Mega and Leonardo
On-board polarized 2 JST battery
Simulation using Arduino IDE
14 sewing tap pads for attachment and electrical connections
The on-board regulator
Applications of AdaFruit Board
Electromagnetic Field Detecting Dress, it is extremely easy to identify EMF signals in order to save ourselves from radiation. Wearable thermometer that is certainly very important to patients.
To sum up, finally we could conclude that the various kinds of microcontroller boards are accustomed to develop different programs like electronic projects, electronic home appliances, etc. I hope you have acquired a greater perception of this idea. I you have any questions concerning this thought, make sure you provide a useful recommendations by writing comments in the comment section below. What follows is a question for you, What is the difference between Arduino board and Arduino Nano board?