Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Maker Faire New York 2013 Electronics Stage: Choosing a Board II”.
Okay, sorry we’re a couple of minutes over time um. So this is choosing a microcontroller board. It’S all about picking the right board for your project, because that’s what it comes down to. There is no right choice. There’S just lots of wrong choices.
Um we’re currently seeing a real explosion in new boards coming onto the market, especially in the last six months, and that’s pretty much down to kickstarter and the crowdfunding experience. The the whole. The whole board market has been opened up by crowdfunding. There’S lots of clones.
There’S lots of niche boards um and there’s no real reason to expect this trend is going to slow down. In fact, i think it’s actually we’re going to expect more new boards, not less, although before to be fair, most of these new boards are going to disappear. Just as quickly as they arrive, they’re, probably only going to be one run of them. So it’s important not to choose the wrong board. That’S going to be gone in 20 minutes and you’re never going to see it again, and the real problem is actually really hard to differentiate between all of these clones and competitors, not even just for the beginner but for the fairly advanced people. Sometimes the differences did not matter, it’s like it only matters if that particular board has a difference that makes a real difference to your project, say you’re short on sram on your arduino. Well, there’s a board for that. It’S called the goldilocks.
It was crowdfunded out of the australia australian possible site which is like kickstarter for australians. So as little as six months ago, the choice was really simple. If you wanted to talk to arbitrary bits of hardware, you bought arduino microcontroller boards. If you needed the power of an arm cpu and wanted to run linux, then you bought a raspberry pi, and that was it okay.
So that’s if you get your hands on the raspberry pi, because the demand was so high that there was a six month waiting list. That’S pretty much shut it out now, but that’s fine! So i’m going to talk about some of the alternatives. But if you just want to wander off now, if you’re done, if you’re bored already, it’s still probably probably the best advice, i’m gon na give you buy an arduino and buy a raspberry pi, because those are the ones with the biggest community behind them. And that’s actually going to make a big difference if you’re a beginner, because if you have a problem, someone’s already solved it, but google knows you go to google, you type your problem in you type.
An error message in google will tell you the answer. It’S awesome, but that only works if you’re, not the first person to hit the problem and that’s one of the reasons. If you’re a beginner, i would say: go away: buy arduino buy a raspberry pi, there’s a big community behind those boards. So let’s talk about microcontroller boards and the arduino specifically, so every so often there’s a piece of technology that becomes a lever that lets the people move the world just a little bit and the arduino is one of these levers. It started off as a project to give artists easy access to microcontrollers for interactive exhibits and installations, and i think it’s going to end up in the someone all of the science. Museums is a building block of the current and the new industrial revolution um.
It allows rapid, cheap prototyping for embedded projects, and it turns out to it turns fair what used to be fairly tough hardware projects into software projects, and we all know from the valley experiences and the various dot-com booms that as soon as it’s software, it’s easy. You just sit down and you write some codes and it’s all easy, so software’s easy, hardware’s hard. Well all right. Software is not easy, but it’s easier than hardware, so the arduino is based around an 8-bit atmel, 8 uh, 18 mega micro controller and, like all the dev boards, it breaks out the digital, pins, analog, pins, pulse width, modulation, pins and all the other pins from the Microcontroller in an easily accessible way, um and in the arduino’s case, in an actually somewhat idiosyncratic footprint, but that’s actually now becoming the standard in the industry which is sort of weird and no one really expected.
But there you go um, it’s a solid development, experi platform and both for experienced people and beginners. But strangely enough, perhaps the real power of the arduino isn’t the hardware at all um. Instead, it’s the arduino development environment and while there are many other boards out there that have similar functionality to the arduino, the the arduino has perhaps succeeded the best in mass in wrapping the messy details of using microcontrollers and doing embedded hardware away from the user. It’S it’s simplified, the development experience um and, as a result, it’s spot many imitators and clones, and it’s drawn that huge community. I was told talking about earlier around it.
So there are alternatives and, as i said, i’m not going to go through them all, because there’s hundreds and hundreds of these things, but while the arduino is based around the atmel 18 mega, this is the ti launch pad based around texas instruments: msp430 chip. Now the msp430 is pretty similar to the atmel 80 mega chip that the arduino uses, but there are some differences, and perhaps the most interesting one uh, for you guys is that this is a really low power chip. It’S also got really easy. Programmable access to the sleep functions, so if you want to produce a a project that sits on uses a battery and is somewhere inaccessible for months or years at a time, this board’s actually a really good choice. The big problem, at least until recently with the launchpad, was that the msp430 programming environment wasn’t that simple. It was eclipse. So if you weren’t a professional software developer and you weren’t used to using these big development environments, it wasn’t so easy to develop for this board.
This actually got solved um by this thing, which is called energia uh like the russian rocket, and it has that little rocket as an icon, and it’s pretty much exactly like the arduino ide. It looks exactly like the arduino ide. It’S based around the same processing, wiring type background and it’s cross platform windows, os x, linux and just like, and you can pretty much take code and it almost looks exactly the same as the arduino environment. So suddenly the msp430 has become much more practical for developers.
If you’re looking to use it in a project, so single board computers, so single board computers existed long before the raspberry pi, and i mean i was using a board called the gum stick so called because it was about the size of a stick of gum. Um fairly extensive about 10 years ago, in some projects, however, like the arduino, the raspberry buy, has single-handedly rebooted the whole market for single board computers and it, and it’s brought an explosion of boards onto that market, and you can see a whole bunch of them here. At maker faire today that it’s like i from here, i can see like three or four boards that wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the raspberry pi treading the ground in front of them. However, unlike the arduino, the raspberry pi was never designed for makers.
It wasn’t designed for us, it wasn’t intended to be used to talk to hardware. It was designed as an educational tool for children in british schools to learn programming. That was what it was. It’S a charitable foundation out of britain.
That was it wanted to put small, very cheap boards into british schools so that the kids could learn how to program and but the pr well, the price was 35 bucks and at 35 bucks it looked suddenly made it very very attractive to us to makers to Use it to talk to hardware, if you needed linux, if it was too much for an arduino, if you wanted to talk to the network and the raspberry pi itself is a large step up from the arduino in terms of the processing power it it’s. As i said, it’s a linux computer, it’s got a lot of the same interfaces as your normal laptop or desktop machine hdmi ethernet usb i mean this is basically exactly what it says in the tin. It’S a computer on a board and, as a result, programming for the pi is very simple, similar for programming, a normal computer. You log in you sort of you, connect either connect a tv and a keyboard and a mouse, and you log in or you secure shell into the board and you use whatever programming languages you normally use python or perl, or ruby or javascript or whatever. It is you’re comfortable with so, as i said, there’s a lot more capability here, but there’s also a lot of drawbacks, so it has to boot up. It takes a long while to boot up, there’s very there’s very few pins to actually talk to arbitrary bits of hardware. If you have lots of hardware, you need to talk to the raspberry, pi isn’t actually a great fit, and what you might want to do is actually connect an arduino to your raspberry pi and use the raspberry pi to talk to your arduino and your arduino. To talk to your hardware, so single board computers that were designed for makers – this is the beaglebone black. Now the beaglebone is another texas instruments boards, and it was designed from the ground up to talk to hardware and it’s designed to talk to sensors and actuators and other things, and the board was designed for makers rather than educators. Now the original beaglebone board, what looked pretty much like this, except it was white and it was 89 bucks, which was just too much of a stretch for most people when the pie was 35 bucks and did mostly most of what you wanted, but the new beaglebone Black is 45 bucks and it’s a big step up from the raspberry pi. It’S got a faster processor. It’S got built-in storage, as well as the sd cards, but like the pi runs linux, it has ethernet it’s usb. It’S hdmi, it’s a computer that runs linux, but it’s designed to talk to arbitrary bits of hardware. So we have the um.
The arduino is 25 to 30 bucks. The ti launch pad, which i talked about. It’S really really cheap.
It’S 10 bucks and it’s got less capabilities than the the arduino, but if you you’re, okay with that, if your project can handle that it’s a great alternative, especially if you want to low power, if you need low power, there’s actually usually a ti coupon floating around For 25 bucks off your first purchase from ti um, i think hackaday just picked it up and it got like wiped yeah. Okay, someone’s saying he just got white. I think hecate picked it up in the 18th and it lasted a day.
So there’ll be another one. Ti does a lot of them, and so you can actually get two of these for free, most of the time um and then single board computers. There there’s two versions of the raspberry pi one with ethernet one without so it’s 35 bucks for 25 bucks respectively, but it only has eight pins, like that’s, not a lot of pins um, whereas the 45 buck beaglebone black has 65 pins.
So if you need the extra capability to talk to that hardware, that’s a lot of extra pins for just 10 bucks. So well that isn’t quite the end of the story. Um announced earlier in the year at maker, the bay area maker faire is the arduino un and you can actually buy it for the first time here at maker faire in the us it’s over in the maker shed over that way. Until now, it’s only been available. Uh in euros from the arduino store, so this is the first in a series of embedded linux boards from arduino um.
It comes with integrated wi-fi, it’s fundamentally, an arduino leonardo on one side and a mips linux variant on the other side and there’s a special bridge library to talk to the two. So you can um, do your networking in the the linux side and you can do your hardware in the arduino side. So it’s pretty cool um, it’s 69 bucks, but then you do get sort of two boards in one. So it’s not an unreasonable price.
Um there’s another interesting board, which i will mention is it’s actually still in its kickstarter? Well, it’s not kickstarter. It still has crowdfund funding campaign. It’S one of the first boards to come out of uh dragon innovation. I think they’ve got a stall over there somewhere. This is the tesl microcontroller board and it’s built for web developers, not hardware hackers.
This actually runs javascript interpreter based around the the lua runtime. It’S compatible with nodejs. So if you’re a node developer, if you’re a javascript developer, you can actually run your nodes directly on the metal.
You can run it directly on the microcontroller and it comes with wi-fi built in off the shelf. So this is actually a really cool board. That’S designed from the ground up to be part of the internet of things. This is designed for web developers to to get into hardware it’s defined for makers to get into to network-enabled devices.
So it’s a really cool board. There’S also another board. That’S on kickstarter called the esperino, which is another javascript board.
Um, that’s nearing the end of its crowdfunding session. Both of them are they’re fully funded. So go look at dragon innovation for this one and kick starter for the esperino.
I think i never can pronounce it right and one of the things that’s interested me about this is whether it’s actually going to bring the javascript developers into our campaigns on the maker camp and bring a whole new community of makers in so um summary then buy An arduino or raspberry pi, if you really don’t know what to buy the other boards, are really specialty boards that, if you have a specific need, a specific niche to fill in your project, you need something. If you need um need low power. Msp 430 is a good idea if you need lots and lots of pins and you need linux and high power.
Networking beaglebone black is your absolute thing to do. If you know, javascript wait for this board to come out i’ve. Actually, i’ve got a pre-production model on my desk at home.
It’S actually quite neat and then there’s a whole bunch of other boards that are kicking around that. If you need something niche, there is a board for you, but if you don’t need the niche buy the board with the biggest community, any questions nope. Well.
Thank you very much. .