Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Maker Faire New York 2013 Electronics Stage: Choosing a Board I”.
This is a basic introduction on how to choose a microcontroller board for your project. So Matt was talking about the BeagleBone, which is one of the boards, i’ll mention and the pipe which I’ll also mention we’re going to mention a few other ports as well. So we’re currently seeing an explosion in boards coming onto the market and it doesn’t see any reason to expect over the next year or two we’re going to see any slowdown in that trend and that trends driven by Kickstarter is driven by crowdfunding. In fact, I’m anything. I’Ve expected to see more new boards, not less. Of course, a fair number of these boards are just going to disappear.
So if you invest your time in learning that platform you’re going to waste your time, so you have to you have to choose a board with community behind it and it’s actually rather hard to differentiate between these boards, not just for the beginner, but for the a Fairly advanced user as well, because sometimes the differences aren’t really going to matter a whole lot depending on what your project is. So as recent as recently six months ago, the choice is actually going to be fairly simple. If you want to talk to arbitrary bits of hardware, your best bet was to borrow an Arduino boards. If you need the power of an arm-based board or like a full linux computer, you probably wanted to buy a Raspberry Pi, and that is, if you could get your hands in one until fairly recently was actually quite hard to buy one a Raspberry Pi, but some People been waiting for up to six months and what I’m going to talk about some of the alternatives if you just want to wander off now, if that’s it, that’s your time. That’S still pretty good advice because there’s a whole bunch of community behind these boards and if you go to google – and you have a problem, then someone’s probably already found and solved your problem, which is a really important part of like getting stuff done anyway.
Let’S talk about theory, microcontroller boards and the Arduino, and specifically so i love the arduino III. I think it’s a great board every so often a piece of technology becomes a lever. You know that you can move the less. You move the world just a little bit and the Arduino is one of these levers. It started off as a project to give artists access to embedded micro processors for interactive installations, but I think this actually could end up in the Science Museum. This is one of the fundamental building blocks at the next Industrial Revolution, because if you go to Kickstarter and you look at any major electronics project there, it’s pretty much a road Reno to drive projects, it’s like at the heart of it. There’S an arduino compatible device. It allows rapid, cheap prototyping for embedded systems, and it turns what used to be fairly tough hire projects into simple software and, as we all saw from the valley, simple software scales really easily.
So the Arduino is an 8-bit. Microcontroller is based around an atmel 18 mega and like old development boards, it breaks out digital pins, analog, pins and other pins from the controller. Tell are you to easily access these from software? Its footprint is a bit idiosyncratic, so you can’t just stick it the right way into a breadboard, but weirdly enough, this footprint has become popular enough there’s becoming a de facto industry standard. There’S other boards, not based around the atmel processor, are actually coming to use.
This form factor because there’s so many add-on devices for the Arduino, it’s a solid dev platform, not just for the beginner but for advanced juice as well. But, strangely enough, perhaps the real power of your Twitter system isn’t the hardware in since the Arduino development environment, and while there are many other boards offering similar functionality, there’d we know is done, probably the best job of wrapping all of the power and difficulty of microcontroller Development down into a simple piece of software, and because of that has spawned a huge number of imitators and clones and it’s drawn a huge community around it. And that’s one of the points i’m going to try make over and over again as a community is a really important thing for a board.
So this is one of the alternatives, while the arduino is based around the atmel processor. This this is the ti. Launchpad is based around the Texas Instruments msp430, and the msp430 is actually a pretty similar chip to the atmel 80 measure.
But there are some differences, and one of the really important differences here is that the msp430 has really low power consumption. If you want to put user bored and has easy accessible, it’s for sleep functionality, so you can make the process to go to sleep and not use. Well, hardly any our toll. So, if your prayer, if your projects going to sit with a battery for years at a time, this is actually a really good choice aboard the big problem until at least until recently for the launch pad and the msp430 was the programming environment. There’S been a whole generation makers, they have grown up with the Arduino programming environment. That meant it was really easy to access the boards, and until recently I do a programming.
The launchpad was an eclipse-based thing. You had to use Eclipse which, if you were not a big software guy, that was not a good thing to do. This is solved with the arrival of energy. Yes, it’s the same name as the rocket and a nice little rocket symbol on the icon. It says: cross-platform support is Windows, OS X, Linux.
It looks pretty much exactly like the Arduino IDE. You can use pretty much the same code to use with the Arduino, so it’s suddenly make the made the launch pad and the msp430 a lot more accessible to beginners, which is really cool. So that’s the the two micro controller boards I’m going to talk about.
Let’S talk about single board computers, so single board computers existed well before the arrival of the Raspberry Pi, i was using something called a gum, stick board, which was the size of a stick of gum. Hence the name which came rather germany for about 10 years ago. For various projects, however, like the arduino before it, the Raspberry Pi has basically single-handedly rebooted the whole market for single board computers and, like the Arduino before it’s it’s great, created a whole bunch of imitators, not necessary clones here, because the board the board sufficiently complicated. They don’t a clone it, but it’s created a whole bunch of imitators. Another single board computing projects and there’s a whole bunch of these around now and make her fair today that you wouldn’t have seen two years ago, because they just wouldn’t have existed without the pie. But, unlike the Arduino, the pie was never designed for makers.
This was a board built by a British charitable foundation for educational purposes. It was supposed to go into schools to serve as a programming environment for kids, and it suffers for that. It’S not designed to talk to hardware, however, a 35 bucks.
Well, it’s pretty much a no-brainer. If you want to talk to hardware from a single board computer in your use, these are pretty limited. So, as I said that the pie is a large step up from there do, we know in terms of processing power is designed to run linux.
It’S a lot of the same interface is a regular computer, hdmi ethernet USB. Basically, this is a little computer on the board. The name says it all: it’s a single board computer, so programming for the pie is very simpler than programming and any other. Well, your laptop or anything else like that, it’s just it runs off an SD card. It puts Linux, you login by a secure shell or you attach your monitor and a keyboard, and you bring up a desktop so but, as I said, so, it’s got a lot of general. It’S got some general purpose pins, but it talking to arbitrary hardware is actually pretty hard, which is where this board comes in.
This is the BeagleBone again from texas instruments, and this was designed from the ground up to talk to hardware, and you can see there’s a whole lot of extra breakout pins down either side that weren’t visible on the Raspberry Pi. So the original version this board was pretty expensive. It was like 89 bucks, and that was just too much of a difference from the 35 bucks of the pie, but as Matt mentioned earlier in the talk, if you were there, this is the BeagleBone black. It’S failing. You it came out, I think it was the tail end of last year, maybe and it’s 45 bucks, it’s a step up from the pie. It’S got a faster processor, it’s get built-in storage, as well as the SD cards, but like the PI, runs linux as the hdmi and has you know its access for keep your standard computer peripherals? So a quick summary. So this is the arduino board, its twenty five to thirty bucks. Twenty digital pins, 12 analog pins. This is the ti launchpad and one of the other attractive features is the price. It’S ten bucks directly from TI.
It’S got 14 digital pins, eight analog pins! It’S go to sleep features i was talking about and then on single board computers. You’Ve got the the Raspberry Pi, which is actually 25 bucks. If you don’t want to ethernet or five bucks. If you want internet – and it’s only got eight digital pins, but it does have all those other computer interfaces and then the big stutter step up is the BeagleBone black, which is 45 bucks, just 10, more bucks at the Raspberry Pi.
But it is 65 digital, pins and say seven analog pins. So if you want to talk to hardware from a linux linux, the linux site, then possibly the BeagleBone is where you want to look that. Isn’T the end of the story, however, announced earlier in the year Maker Faire bay area and actually available in the US for the first time here it’s in the maker shed over that way somewhere is the oh you at we know Union and I’ll get into trouble. If I don’t say Union correctly, it’s the first in a series of Linux and bedded boars to come from Arduino.
It comes with integrated Wi-Fi, it’s fundamentally, actually an Arduino Leonardo on one side, with a separate mips lynn, linux board on the other side and is a bridge library to talk to do between the two sides. So you can put all your networking on the linux side and do your arduino stuff that talks to hardware on the Arduino side and it’s it’s it’s pretty cool. It’S.
You can reprogram it remotely via Wi-Fi. It’S got the usual USB cable. It is 69 bucks, but you do get a Linux board and an Arduino board simultaneously.
So that’s maybe not such a bad price. Finally, then this is not in full production that they’re crowdfunding campaigns actually still running. This is the tehsil microcontroller board from the dragon innovation guys over in the tent over there. That’S actually their crowdfunding platform. The cool thing about this board is actually starting a whole new community. This runs JavaScript interpreter I built around the lure runtime, which is compatible with no Jas for any of the web. Programmers in the audience here this effectively runs an event loop on the bare metal of the processor. It comes with built-in Wi-Fi and it’s it’s aboard this designed from the ground up to be used in the Internet of Things, and it’s going to be really interested to see if it brings the JavaScript community with it and there’s a lot of new makers there.
If it does and that’s pretty cool, so I saw one one minute timeline at the back going up. So is any questions I’m happy to take them nope. I must have said it real. Well, I alone.
Thank you. .