Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Maker Faire New York 2013 Electronics Stage: Choosing a Board IV”.
Okay, so my name is aleister allen, i’m an editor for make magazine, and this is uh an introduction to choosing your micro with the correct microcontroller pro for your projects. Um currently we’re seeing an explosion of new boards coming into the market um, and there doesn’t seem to be any reason to expect over the next year or two we’re going to see any sort of slowdown on that trend. If anything, we’re going to see more boards, not less, although a few few of these boards are actually going to disappear just as soon as they arrive, and it’s actually really hard to differentiate between these boards, not just for the beginner, but also for the advanced user. So because a lot of cases, the difference between these two, these boards, don’t really matter that much and as recently as six months ago, the choice is actually going to be fairly simple. If you wanted to talk to arbitrary bits of electronics, your best bet was to buy an arduino microcontroller, and if you needed the power of an arm-based board, and you wanted to run linux, you should probably buy a raspberry pi um.
That is, if you could get your hands on one. There were actually about six months, uh waiting list for one at that point in time. That’S all cleared up these days, but um about six like six months a year ago. It was really hard to get your hands on one um.
I’M gon na talk about some alternatives, but if you just wander off now that that’s actually still pretty good advice um because of the large communities they’re built up around them, i know jason who’s like works at a beaglebone, which i will mention in a couple of Slides jason, don’t worry um, it’s like frowning at that, but it is still good advice, because one of the the thing here is that if you have problems, what do you want as a community to be able to solve those problems ahead of time? If you want to be able to go to google and like type your problem in and then someone’s already solved it, because you just want to make your thing, you don’t want to have to solve problems with the board right anyway. Let’S talk about microcontroller boards and the arduino, now every so often there’s a piece of technology that can become a leaver that lets people move the world and just just a little bit – and i think the arduino is is one of these levers. It started off as a project to get artists access to microcontrollers for interactive designs for installations and embedded, so they could do in better processing. But i think it’s going to end up in most of the science museums around the world.
It’S one of the building blocks of the current the next industrial revolution um. It allows rapid, cheap prototyping for embedded projects, and it turns what used to be fairly hard hardware problems into software problems, and we know from the valley what happens when you turn things into software problems. They just become easier. It’S based around an 8-bit atmel, uh 18-megaprocessor and, like all the um development boards, i’m going to talk about it, breaks out the digital analog, pwm and other pins to easily accessible sort of headers. That down each side of the board that you can plug wires into and breadboard things with um. It’S got a somewhat, idiosync is idiosyncratic footprint, but that’s actually one of its advantages is because it’s becoming a standard like just by sheer force of numbers.
The community around the arduino board is turning the footprint of the board into a hardware standard. It’S a solid development part from both for beginners and experienced users, although, strangely enough, the real part of the arduino system isn’t the hardware at all: it’s the software, it’s the arduino development environment and there. While there are many other boards out there offering similar functionality, the arduino is perhaps succeeded the best in wrapping the the hard bits of developing for a microcontroller board down into software and hiding these the hard bits away from the user and because of that it spawned. Many imitators and clones, and it’s built that community i was talking about that’s so important. There are alternatives, of course, while the arduino is based around the atmel at mega. This is the texas instrument launch pad based around their msp430 processor.
Now the msp430 is actually pretty similar chip to the atmel 18 mega um, which is used by the arduino um. But there are some differences. One of the differences is that this is a really low power chip and it’s also got really good sleep functionality so um. If you want to uh, if you want to use it, use a project where you want to use really low power or you’re, going to stick in a battery and stick it somewhere fairly inaccessible, and you want to run for a couple of months before you have To like go in there and change the battery, this is actually a really good alternative. The big problem, at least recently, is developing for the the msp 430 and the launch pad was actually pretty difficult. Um.
It uses it used to use the eclipse environment. So if you weren’t a professional software developer, if you weren’t used to using those big enterprise level tools, it was actually pretty hard to develop for this board. This has all gone away. This is the energia environment which, if you looked at the the previous slide, looks exactly like the arduino ide, except this one’s red, which is obviously a major difference.
It’S red um, the the code inside it is pretty pretty similar to the um, the arduino code, you’re going to use um, but it’s pretty much solved the development project. Uh problem for the launch, pads energy is still in active development. So there’s some things that you can’t get access to on the board that you could get. It could do if you use eclipse, but that’s going away so um, it’s becoming easier to use the msp430, which is a really cool chip as a good alternative to the arduino. So single board, computers, um, so single board computers existed well before the arrival of the raspberry pi, i was using a board called a gum. Stick so called because it was the size of a stick of gum about 10 years ago in a few projects and they’ll exist long after the demise of the raspberry pi i mean, but like the raspberry pi, like the arduino before the raspberry pi has basically single-handedly Rebooted the market for single board computers and, like the arduino, it’s brought an explosion of boards uh to the market like not clones, not competitors really, but it’s a sudden awakening of of the realization that there’s a market for these boards that people want to use these Boards that they’re actually useful, unlike the arduino, the raspberry pi, wasn’t designed for makers.
It wasn’t designed for us. It was designed for educators and it’s actually quite hard to talk to hardware from it has very few capabilities to talk to hardware. We use it all the time as makers, but that’s because it costs 35 bucks. It was cheap enough that we wanted.
We could overlook the downsides of the platform to see the fact it was cheap and it had the power to the power that we needed and it had some of the power to toxic hardware capabilities and a lot of people have worked around it and there’s some Really cool hacks and cool projects have been done with the pi. The pi is a large step up from the arduino in terms of processing power. It was designed to run linux. It’S got a lot of the same interfaces as your laptop or your desktop.
It’S got. Hdmi ethernet usb so programming, the pi is pretty much like programming a computer. You can use python ruby, perl, javascript fortran, whatever you actually want to do to to write code for this platform. It’S just a computer on a board that clues in the name there um but, as i said it, doesn’t have a lot of general purpose.
Io pins. You can see that the small bank labeled gpio there. That’S that’s what it has um. So it could be an issue if you use lots of pins. This is uh the beaglebone black from texas instruments it was designed, unlike the pi, was designed from the ground up to talk to arbitrary bits of hardware, sensors actuators other things it was designed for makers.
Rather than educators – and it really does show the original beaglebone was just a little bit too expensive. However, at 89 bucks it didn’t really manage to build. You know, and just yeah yeah you’re happy what i’m saying that right: yeah um it didn’t really build the momentum that the pi did just because it was far more accessible uh for the general user, because the pi was 35 bucks.
But this is the the latest board from beaglebone, which is the beaglebone black again the clues in the name, this one’s black, the previous one, was white um beside this new color, then your board has the same footprint. It’S got a similar layout, but crucially, the prices drop from 89 bucks to 45 bucks, which is a you know, a much more competitive price point um, but it’s also a big step up from the raspberry pi. So you get a whole bunch more for that extra 10 bucks, a faster processor. It’S got built-in file storage as well as the sd cards, and it’s also got the same ethernet usb and hdmi, and you know the the pi has. But crucially, it’s got a lot more general purpose. Io pins! You can see the headers here, there’s a lot more headers here than there was in the pi. So just to quickly summarize, there was the arduino 25 30 bucks. The ti launch pad it’s just 10 bucks. It’S got a few less pins than the arduino um energia isn’t quite fully baked yet, but it’s a really solid alternative single board computers. There’S the pie at 25 to 35 bucks, the 25 buck.
One doesn’t have any ethernet the 35 buck one does, but it only has a few digital pins um and then there’s the beaglebone black a little bit more in the raspberry pi. But it has a lot more um ability to talk to hardware, and if you want to talk about the beaglebone black, it’s like get jason. Stick your hand up talk to jason at the end of the talk um. That is the end of the story. However, there’s also a few more boards, you should probably know about there’s the arduino une, and this was announced earlier in the year at maker faire barrier uh. This is the first of the linux boards to come out from the arduino company and it comes with integrated wi-fi.
But the interesting thing is it’s fundamentally two different boards. It’S got a arduino leonardo on one hand and then a separate uh linux, mips processor, on the other hand, and then there’s a special bridging library that lets the arduino side. Talk to the linux side and the linux site talks to the the arduino side. So you can do all the networking and heavy lifting of xml and json processing on the linux side by restful api.
Mostly, if you want to, and the talking to hardware bits on the arduino side as well as using all the arduino shields, you can program it remotely via wi-fi, as well as the usual usb cable and it uh arduino partnered, with a company called temboo to give One-Stop api access to data from twitter, facebook, foursquare, fedex, paypal and a few other companies, so you can really get good easy access to social data. Downside is it’s 69 bucks which you know is pretty expensive, but you do get two boards in one. So maybe that’s acceptable um if you actually want to get one. The maker shed still has a few on the shelves. I think – and this today, like the maker faire, was the first time you could get it inside the us um.
One more board that i do want to mention is uh the tessel. This is a board, that’s not actually in full production. Yet still in a crowdfunding campaign uh, it’s the one of the first products to come out of dragon innovation. The dragon have a stall over there, the limbo board. If you you were the previous talk, that’s another one of the dragon innovation crowdfunding campaigns.
Now this tesla board is actually a board built for web developers, not hardware hackers. It runs a javascript interpreter based around the lua run time and is compatible with node.js. So if there’s any web developers in the audience, that meant a lot to them, anyone else didn’t mean anything at all. Basically, it lets you run javascript and an event loop directly well, not directly, but as close to the bare metal, as you possibly can get, which is an inter. You know an interesting concept. It comes with built-in wi-fi off the shelf, so it’s effectively a board.
That’S designed from the ground up to be part of the internet of things, which is like a really cool concept and i’d be interesting to see if it brings the javascript community with it because um, i think that’s really important for the microcontroller boards is the communities And the node.js community already has some history of hardware hacking, this node copter and a couple other things they’ve been doing, which are really quite interesting. So it’s going to bring in a lot of new makers if it does bring the whole web development community with it. So um that’s pretty much what i’ve got so any questions or we can close out nope. Thank you very much. .