Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “A brief explanation of development platforms and microcontrollers”.
Hey thanks for joining me again. I got something important to say so. Won’T you come a little closer? That’S better! I’M! Sorry! Yesterday i put out a video that was about the m5. Stick, it’s a little iot development board in reading through the comments. It is abundantly clear that i completely misjudged the knowledge of our current active audience on youtube. Let me explain a little better at make. We put a lot of effort into our magazine, we put it out quarterly and we slave over this thing. Really there are a limited number of pages and we have to do this: balancing act where we’re trying to pack in electronics projects and hands-on non-electronics projects and easy projects and complicated projects and educational projects and fun projects. But the point is, is that we do cover all of these things in the magazine and you should subscribe i’ll, throw a plug in to the magazine link down below, but looking at our youtube channel, it’s been a very long time since we’ve posted kind of electronics Focused stuff, so it makes perfect sense that whenever i posted the video yesterday about this little thing, the m5 stick – and i said this is an esp32 powered iot development platform that has you know easily accessible pins and an imu people got confused.
That’S a lot of jargon that doesn’t make any sense if you don’t know what microcontrollers are or if you’re not familiar with the world of development boards, so i thought this might be an opportunity to give a super crash course in what development boards are, what a Microcontroller is and why you might want to learn more, so, let’s check them out so to start off really quick. What the heck is a microcontroller, and why should you care well, if you’re interested in building stuff at all, especially if you want to build things that are interactive and move and and think or interact with code or interact with people across the world through the internet? You’Re going to have to mess with microcontrollers they’re in everything too, so a microcontroller is just like a little brain kind of like a little tiny super basic computer that takes relatively basic code and just kind of operates it forever. Now what does that even mean right? So a microcontroller listens on a pin. They’Ve got little pins on them. They listen for something to happen, and then, when that thing happens, they do something else. There’S a lot more complicated stuff that microcontrollers can do, but that’s the basics whenever it comes to development boards. Now a development board is a board that has all kinds of components and stuff connected to a microcontroller that allows you to create your own stuff.
People have made all kinds of cool devices with these, including prototypes for things that go on to be actual products. You can buy in the store, you know you might see. Somebody take one – and you know hook it up to the internet, to give them a flashing light whenever they get email or something like that, which eventually could scale up to be. Something like the pebble watch, which you know is a smart watch that that you might see people wearing and seeing their heart rate and, seeing you know, notifications and things like that. So if you’re wanting to create in the space of electronics or if you just want to dabble in it now is the perfect time, microcontrollers have never been easier to play with. Let me show you some examples now, like i said they come in all shapes and sizes on these boards. Here these are development boards and on these boards we can see a few different microcontrollers. This right here is the microcontroller on this board on this board. This is the microcontroller microcontrollers themselves have a lot of variation. There are some that are more powerful and some that use specific types of languages for programming it can get complicated attached to. That is the development board.
Some of them are pretty bare like what we see here with the arduino or this tiny little digi stump they’re, pretty bare you have a lot of pins to interact with and maybe on the board. You’Ll have a single light or something built in, and the rest is up to you really to bring your own circuit, and some of them now have tons of stuff built into the board for you. So you can hop right into making projects and learning. For example, this one here the adafruit circuit playground, has leds built into it, touch pads for buttons other buttons, a little buzzer.
I think it even has you know a gyroscope, so it can tell how it’s tilted. I might be wrong on that. It’S been a while, since i’ve looked, it’s got circuitry embedded so that you can plug a battery into it and it can properly handle that voltage. They each have their own strong points and weak points, and this video really isn’t going to delve into how to choose which one over the other, because that is a massive massive topic. So, let’s see one in the wild, though not just on a development board, like i said they’re in everything.
Here’S an example: i mess with all the time. This is an xbox one controller, i’ve removed all the screws and we can pop this open and right here. We can see a microcontroller there, a microcontroller there. Now these could be doing various tasks of varying complexity. They could be handling communication over the wireless system back and forth to the xbox. They could be listening for the button presses and sending the signals to the xbox through that wireless system. They could be handling the the battery management and various things like that.
So these development boards all have strong suits and weak suits, and everybody likes to kind of feel out, see what they’re comfortable with see what will meet their needs at a price point that they can handle and that’s where the m5 stick comes in. This thing was 15 bucks. It’S got an esp32, so if you’re into development platforms, that’s a super cheap platform that usually has wireless connectivity and that’s what allows this to be very cheap, and you can go back to that other video before to see some of the details about that. Now further resources, i’ve explained what microprocessors are and development platforms for those we’ll probably be seeing more of those on this channel soon. So where can you learn more? Of course you can go to makezine.com and read our back catalog of blog posts. If you want to see what’s out there and available, i suggest you go to digikey.com adafruit.com sparkfun.com, there’s, probably other stores that have uh arduino.cc.
Maybe google arduino you’ll find it and you’ll be able to see a variety of boards out there and learn what there is to do with them. Each one of those sites has resources and tutorials to learn how to program them and do different projects with them. If you look through our back catalog of projects, if you become a member and get the digital subscription and look through our back catalog of magazines, you’ll find projects that involve various ones, so you can learn different skills. Now, before i go uh, i feel like i’m going to get called out for not mentioning the raspberry pi in this.
So i’ve got one here: here’s raspberry pi there it is now. I don’t consider this a development plan. Yet it is a development platform because you can develop on it, but this is a whole computer.
The raspberry pi is a whole computer. You can plug a keyboard and monitor into it load an operating system on it and use it as a as a desktop computer. So it’s kind of in a class of its own, along with like the beaglebone uh, so i’m not including it with this bunch, but i felt like i had to bring it up.
You can learn more about the raspberry pi by going to their website. Just google raspberry pi or go to raspberrypi.org, i believe it is and you can find out about the raspberry pi. So thank you for bearing with me again i’m sorry for overestimating uh the interest or the the amount of information that we had shared in the past. About development boards, it’s been a long time. Looking back, so let me know down in the comments below what you’d be interested in seeing in the electronics area. What boards are you interested in seeing us explore what kind of tutorial uh content? Would you like to see us produce around electronics, we’re not abandoning anything or leaving anything behind? We just have been overlooking this area, and we’ve got to remedy that all right, we’ll see you next time, you .