Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Maker Faire New York 2013 Electronics Stage: Choosing a Board III”.
So my name is alistair allen, i’m from make magazine – and this is a presentation – that’ll tell you uh, which microcontroller board to buy, and the simple answer is the one that you need to buy um. So there’s no right answer to this question: there’s only uh the one that fits your project um and we’re currently seeing an explosion in new boards that are coming onto the market, especially in the last six months, and this is driven uh almost directly by kickstarter by Crowdfunding there’s a lot of niche boards uh coming in and i don’t think there’s any sort of um there’s any real reason to expect that trend is gon na slow down. If anything, we’re gon na see more boards coming onto the market and to be fair. Most of these new boards are going to disappear just as soon as they arrive, so you don’t want to hook yourself up to a board. That’S not going to be there in six months time, but the real, the real secret is. It’S actually fairly hard to differentiate between a lot of these boards and not just for the beginner, but for experts too, and sometimes the differences aren’t going to matter a whole lot. So as recently as six months ago, the choice was actually fairly simple. If you wanted to use a six bit, eight bit r um microcontroller, to talk to rpg bits of hardware, you use the my arduino boards um. If you needed the power of an arm baseboard and you wanted to run linux and run your project from linux and use a lot of networking, you use the raspberry pi um. That is, if you could get your hands on one.
Until recently, it’s actually been fairly hard to find one um, the the supply problems have been fixed by now, but there was a six month waiting list at one point and while i’m going to like talk about some alternatives, if you have to go now, if you Just like want to run now, that’s actually really still really good advice, um, there’s a huge amount of community between behind those two boards and that’s really important, because that means, if you have a problem, you can just go to. Google and google will know the answer, because someone else will have already had your problem and that’s a big thing. So well i’m going to talk about alternatives.
Um! That’S still, that’s probably still the best advice to take away anyway. Let’S talk about microcontroller boards and the arduino every so often there’s a piece of technology that comes along. They can become a lever unless you move the world just a little bit and the arduino has become one of these levers. It started off as a project to give artists access to microcontrollers, so they could do interactive installations and exhibits, and i think it’s actually going to end up in most science.
Museums is one of the building blocks of the next industrial revolution, because if you look on kickstarter, if you go to the crowdfunding sites, most of the the gizmos and widgets and gadgets that are there are arduino compatible right at the core of these things. There’S an arduino board, or at least an atmel processor, that what used to be on an arduino board. It allows rapid, cheap prototyping of your project and like, and it’s based around an 8-bit uh, atmel 18 mega processor and like most of these dev boards, it breaks out the digital pins, the analog pins pwm. It lets you use arbitrary bits of hardware really easily motors and steppers and leds and moving things and blinking lights on and off it lets.
You talk to arbitrary bits of hardware and despite the sort of quirky layout, this is actually becoming fairly industry standard. There’S lots of other boards that have come along that aren’t arduino compatible in software, but are in the pin out so that you can use the hardware that’s been built for arduinos really easily. Strangely enough, perhaps, though, the real part of the arduino system isn’t the hardware, it’s actually the arduino development environment and, while there’s lots of other boards that offer similar sort of specs, the arduino has probably done the best job of wrapping. The the hard to use bits of developing on a microcontroller inside easy to use software, and because of that, it’s used it spawned a lot of imitators and clones, and it’s drawn up that huge community.
I was talking about to it so um alternatives. Well, while the arduino is based on the atmel 80 mega processor, this is the ti launch pad board. It’S based around the texas instruments. Msp430. Now the msp430 chip is actually quite similar to the atmel chip that the arduino is based around, but it’s got some interesting differences. One of those differences is it’s really low power and it’s got really good sleep capabilities.
So, if you’re building a battery bar power battery powered project, that’s quite hard to say, actually a battery power project and you need to run for months or personally even years. This is actually a really good choice to develop for and it, but the real uh problem. For the msp 413 until recently was the programming environment um.
It was eclipse so unless you were an experienced software developer used to building in like really enterprise level tools, it was really hard to build for, especially if you were coming from the arduino world, and this has all been sold by the arrival of energia like it’s. The the same name as the russian rocket and has a little rocket on the icon, and this is effectively a programming environment that looks a lot like arduino. It’S red, not blue, that’s pretty much the difference. Um you can more or less use the same code. There’S got slightly different ways of talking to the pins, but not very much, and it’s cross-platform windows, osx and linux.
So it’s pretty much much easier now to talk to an msp430 almost as easy as talk to the atmel processor and the arduino okay, so that was uh microcontrollers. Let’S talk about single board computers, so single board linux computers existed well before the arrival of the raspberry pi, i was using something called the gum stick so-called because it’s about the size of a stick of gum uh fairly extensively about 10 years ago. In some projects um, but like the arduino before it, the raspberry pi has more or less single-handedly wiped the board with its competitors. It’S rebooted the whole single board computing market, and because of that, it’s brought about an explosion of different boards, hoping to compete with it.
Um, if you look look around just these two, two or three tents here, you’ll find five six boards that wouldn’t be here uh. If it wasn’t for the community, the raspberry pi is brought together um, but, unlike the arduino, the raspberry pi was never intended for makers. It wasn’t intended for you or me.
It was actually built by a uk charitable foundation to go into british schools to help kids learn to program um and because of that, it’s actually not actually set up to talk to arbitrary bits of hardware. But the 35 sticker price meant that lots of us bought it and used it and there’s a whole bunch of instruction and like examples out in the web, that you can use uh to make your own projects. So the raspberry pi is a big step up from the arduino in terms of processing power.
It’S a linux computer. It’S got all the same. Regular interfaces as your normal laptop hdmi, ethernet, usb um, so programming.
The pi is pretty much the same as programming your computer. You can use python or perl or ruby or javascript or whatever your language, your choices, but it’s got a lot less general purpose pins, as i said so if that could be a real issue, if you’re going to use a lot of pins, if you want to Talk to a lot of arbitrary bits of hardware um, on the other hand, the beaglebone from texas instruments and other texas instruments. Bonds was designed from the ground up to talk to arbitrary bits of hardware, sensors actuators, other things um.
So it’s designed for makers and not educators. Unfortunately, the original beaglebone board, which was white instead of black, which is pretty much the only difference you can is immediately obvious – was 89 bucks, so 89 bucks to set at 35 bucks was just too much of a difference. So it didn’t really have the the massive takeoff that you know it really probably deserved. This is the new beaglebone black um. It’S got a bunch of new features. Um, it’s got the, but it’s the same footprint as the previous beaglebone.
So if you could hardware that worked with that, if you still use it crucially, however, the prices drop from 89 bucks to 45 bucks, which is much more reasonable. Um, it’s a step up from the raspberry pi. It’S got a faster processor. It’S got built-in file storage as well as the sd cards uh. I like the black uh, the pi runs linux. It’S got ethernet usb, hdmi um, so there’s the arduino 25 to 30 bucks, the launch pad, which is the alternative.
I talked about it’s just 10 bucks from texas instruments. It’S a bit less capable than the arduino board, but it’s really dark cheap. So you can afford to like put in a project and leave it for single board computers. You’Ve got the the pi at 25 to 30 bucks and then the much more capable eaglebone black at 45 bucks. If you really need that the huge number of digital pins it offers. However, that isn’t really the end of the story.
Um, i noticed earlier they ended earlier in the year makifay bay area, there’s the arduino yoon, which is the first of the series of linux boards for uh by arduino. It’S fundamentally an arduino leonardo on one side and an open, wrt compatible linux mips board. On the other side and there’s a bridge library that lets you talk to between the two, which means that you can do your networking on the linux side and you’re talking to arbitrary bits of hardware on the arduino side, which is actually pretty cool.
Unless you do the bit that actually works easiest on the processor, that actually does it easiest uh. The price of this board is actually 69 bucks, which is, you know, a little bit expensive, but you do actually get two boards in one um. So it’s not that unreasonable! It’S actually available uh for the first time here in the u.s over in the maker shed, which is over there by the mousetrap.
Previously you need euros and that internet thing to buy it um. So one last board before i uh finish up the um: this is the tesl microcontroller board. It’S not actually available for sale. Yet this is still in its crowdfunding period. It’S one of the first program boards or things to come out of dragon innovation, which is a new crowdfunding platform. They have a booth over there um.
This is a microcontroller board built for web developers. No hardware, hackers, it runs a javascript interpreter built around the lure runtime and it’s fully node.js compatible so for any web developers in the audience. This is the board for you. You can just take your node codes, run it in this board and it just works.
It’S effectively running an event loop of javascript directly on the metal. Well, as close as javascript can get to the metal anyway, which is actually pretty cool. It’S got built-in wi-fi off the shelf. It’S a board designed to build the internet of things um and and let your project be part of that internet. I think so. That’S actually a pretty cool. It’S it’s! It’S a it’s a possible third community! There’S the the single board community, which is mainly focused around the raspberry pi, the the microcontroller community, which is mainly focused around the arduino boards and now there’s this javascript community, which might bring a whole bunch of javascript programmers into the the maker community to build whole New things, which could be pretty cool and i’m pretty much out of time, but if there’s any questions, i’m happy i’ll stick around for five seconds and i’m happy to take them at the side. Thank you.
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