Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Which Board is Right for Your Project – Nick Raymond”.
My name is nick raymond, i’m the contributing editor at make and uh in the next 15 minutes, or so i hope to give a brief, low level introduction to some of the available microcontrollers and single computer boards that are available in the market in 15 minutes. There’S no way to cover everything: that’s out there in the landscape of microcontrollers, so i’ll do a couple: uh ideas about how to choose a board: some available technology, that’s out there and some terminology to get things familiar. So you can go out and kind of check out maker faire, see the makers who are here see the latest and greatest in boards, um that we have here today at the exhibit and in the future help you choose a board for the the next thing. You’Re going to build so we’ll go over uh, basically, some some board terminology that may be a little um generic to the types of boards available. There’S microcontrollers and single board computers, they’ll, have similar components, they’ll be different varieties and flavors and different manufacturers, but you can use some familiar terms to talk about all of them and kind of compare and contrast. Then we’ll go over sort of what is available right now as far as arduinos arduino alternatives going wireless and then some single board, computers and fpga is kind of the advanced upper level. Of that jason was just on talking about the be going black.
So it’s a great example, so previously uh, maybe a couple years ago, even if you’re trying to do a project – and you wanted to have inputs and read sensors and get data and interact with the world, it was a little difficult. Maybe you were limited to certain programming languages and certain hardware, but really over the last couple years it was really expanded what’s available, and so now we can think about things. Like does my project move? Do i want to connect to the internet uh? Do i want to connect to my device or project wirelessly or with the usb controller um? What size do i want my project to be? Is it really small? Is it gon na be really big? Are there weight constraints, um and then eventually over time, is the project going to grow and evolve, or is it something you want to just build right now get it done really cheap and move on to the next idea, so a while back, maybe a year ago, Make published volume 36? It was the boards edition. So there’s a lot information in that as well. I will be reviewing some of the details from that document. That’S also an online resource.
You can look up, but you can see there’s a lot of different kind of boards just on the cover and a lot of different colors sizes, um and performance wise. So you can’t just compare apples to apples uh. It just doesn’t work as easily as that, but we can go over a few terms, uh that you may find that kind of connects the common thread, and so one is, is the processor right. So this will be on the board and that’s sort of the brains of what you’re going to be using, and so it’s things to think about is how fast is the processor? What’S the megahertz gigahertz, what’s the speed that it can do, computations, maybe that’s important to your project, and maybe it’s not. There are some things to note, especially now. In this landscape there are microcontrollers which are a little bit simpler.
They take inputs, outputs motor controls, basic sensors; sometimes they have analog digital converters and now what we’re seeing with the raspberry pi, the beaglebone and other boards there’s these sort of single board computers. It’S all in one on there you’ve got the graphics. You’Ve got the audio um and so there’s still the microcontroller, the arduino, nice and easy to use, but now there’s also these a little bit more advanced projects we can get into so there’s the processor blinking, usually a bigger chip, and this is just a generic sort Of beaglebone-esque looking board, we had illustrated with magazine. Another thing to think about: is the input output pins? So do you want a lot of them? Do you need a lot of them for your project? Do you want to take in inputs or do outputs for leds? Sensors relays motor control is really important.
Other parts that you can interface with do the digital pins that you’re using are the digital pins are the analog pins. Sometimes they don’t have digital to analog converters built into the board, and that can be something to limit the project you do. Do you want to have communication protocols so that you can have your device communicate with other devices, so you have serial ports or spi communication. I2C, how are you going to interface with your sensors that can depend on what kind of board you’re using as well then there’s the power input usually most commonly is some sort of a barrel jack like a dc barrel jack you can plug into a wall warts. I usually can take some sort of a 5 volts regulated. Some boards are more specific. They only require 3.3 volts depending on the chip architecture. So again, what do you have access to? Is it going to be? Solar powered is going to use lithium-ion batteries that provide 3.3 volts consistently.
Is it can be plugged into a wall? Are you driving motors? What’S what’s the power supply situation? Does it have to be regulated? These are all things to think about as you’re choosing a project or choosing a board, and then there’s also some of these boards have built-in features on them already, such as buttons or leds. That help you indicate if the board is transmitting data, is the power turned on they’re, already fabricated and mounted to the surface of the board. You don’t have to wire anything up. They’Re really convenient to use. Maybe you’d like that to be integrated into your project as well uh, especially now, there’s a lot of options for networking and connecting to the internet. It’S a really great thing about the new projects coming out. Do you want to use uh wireless communications? Are you gon na have access to a router? Do you want to connect and stream data and upload it to the cloud or to a service that you can then see it on your phone or on a tablet or some other a lot of the boards, especially the the single board? Computers? They have a network port right on there, as shown in this example. Otherwise they have built-in wireless routers that we’ll get to again some of the more advanced boards.
They also have this onboard graphics, so you can plug them right in using usb, and you can display images. You can talk to keyboards mice, use them as auxiliary inputs to a computer or a laptop. You can plug in wi-fi dongles, for example, and you can add sort of the flexibility of the board itself by just adding additional hardware, not so common on some of the simpler microcontrollers, but especially those single computer boards. That’S a great feature, and then most of these are going to have some sort of a programming port, so it sometimes looks very similar to the usb host port. But this one specifically to program the controller and upload code to the chip. You can interface it with again talk back and forth to the laptop over serial, so just similar features to think about, and so in the past, when i was thinking about my personal projects, i’d sort of try to break it down as to what kind of project Am i working on or what do i want to accomplish, and so i think about do i want to have something move. Do i have a robot or a drone or autonomous vehicles that i want to power and work with? Maybe i was interested in logging data for a research project to pull sensor data and see what’s going on in the environment, uh air, monitor, quality, uh, moisture temperature and so forth. Or do i want to have something, that’s wireless and remote and create a mesh network of sensors, all over say, maker faire, so you could pull data and see in real time what’s going on around the whole event and then there’s also wearables, and so you can Now embed these things on your clothing into dog and cat collars use gps tracking um, you can do health monitoring and there’s really fun things like that, and so now you have to think about not only what is your project going to do, but what board is Going to fit the needs you have, you don’t have to just simply stick with you know in the past. You just choose what was ever available. Maybe it was something really simple, something basic and then you’d go out and you’d buy additional hardware and stack that, on top of the microcontroller to add additional functionality.
So again, you’d start with the basic controller. You would add a wi-fi card or you would add, maybe a motor driver or you would add, sensors on top of that and that could get complicated and expensive. Now, if you know what the end project is going to be, you can go through and you can look through different types of boards that are available and kind of hand. Choose what’ll work for your application, so here we’ll kind of go over some basics. If everyone’s familiar with arduino kind of what’s readily available, it’s a great platform, it’s very user friendly, there’s a huge community, but there’s also arduino alternatives. Those are alternative boards that either use the same form factor. So you can just stack on the arduino shields and use the same shields have been developed by other companies, or sometimes they use the arduino programming language. If you’re familiar with that and you can get different functionalities, there’s also the the single board, computers, uh, the more advanced kind of beagle bones and the raspberry pi’s and then there’s also fpga, for if you would like to just develop your own architecture.
So may look really familiar if you’ve seen a couple of these talks already, but here’s you know some of the the familiar arduino family, there’s the uno and if you needed more pins in the past, you’d upgrade to the mega um. If you want a really small project, you could go with the arduino mini. Basically the same idea. Same form fact uh same same functionality, but it’s a smaller form factor.
If you were uh gon na embed that in something else and then recently, there’s been the leonardo and the leonardo is interesting and that you can plug it right into your laptop and right away it pops up as a usb device. You can use it as like. A keyboard as a mouse really easy with the usb drivers that already come with it and then now there’s on the bottom right.
There’S the duet and that’s actually a much more powerful processor. It’S much faster speed, so it can do computations much quicker. It has many more pins, however, you have to use a regulated 3.3 volts to use that, and so for some applications. That could be a downside, but again these are readily available, a huge community of support, lots of tutorials and a great place to start. However, if you’re also interested, there are other platforms that use the same basic layouts, the same form factor, but they allow you to program in different languages. So there’s the ti launch pad msp430 basically uses a vorm, a form of texas instruments firmware you can copy and paste an arduino sketch the program into their program. Upload it to that chip runs just fine. However, it only costs 10 dollars. So it’s a nice alternative. If there’s a budget in place, there’s the pickaxe 28×2 shield base, if you’re familiar with basic and programming in that language, you could use this same board again stack on similar hardware that you can use with an arduino and instead of programming in the arduino language. You can use basic um, there’s also the net we know plus two which uses the dot net framework for anyone. Who’S familiar with the microsoft platform also has included on there the ethernet, so you can connect that to the internet, start downloading information and then there’s the parallax, propeller, asc, plus, and so, whereas the arduino uno, for example, is a one chip.
It’S got one processor. This guy has eight, so you have eight simultaneous loops going and pulling sensor data doing things in real time, controlling robot, actuators and axes, um, all all synced together and so for roboticists, that’s really great because they use things called, interrupts and there’s timing problems, and so, With this propeller parallax propeller board that becomes simplified so moving away from the alternatives, there’s also things like going wireless, and so, if you are here’s an example of the arduino un, it’s actually got two two processors on it: one’s a linux based processor. I can use the open, wrt kind of like a web hosting and then there’s also a basic microcontroller very much like the uno on there. So you still get the functionality of a microcontroller, but you can now connect to the internet. Do really interesting things with that. There’S the bleed duino, if you’re interested in connecting your device to like, say your mobile phone that has bluetooth.
It’S got a built-in bluetooth radio into it, functions very similar to arduino in the programming language. But now you can just effortlessly, connect your sensors and get the data onto your phone or a tablet. There’S the pinocchio in the top right, which has a built-in wi-fi radio.
So you can connect right away to your wireless network at home or you can create a mesh network of a bunch of little pinocchios all over and they can talk to each other and share information and upload and download and communicate with each other. And then there’s the geogram one, which also has not only the simple microcontroller on it for doing sensors. But it has built-in gps for position tracking and built-in gsm. So you can upload your data to a cellular network and then pull it off onto the internet. And so again in the past, perhaps you wanted to start out with the microcontroller and you wanted to have these functionalities. So you add shields, you add hardware, but now, if you know ahead of time it’s already built into the unit, you can just purchase these separately kind of moving ahead.
Previously matt richardson was talking about the raspberry pi and david was talking about the beaglebones, so i won’t go into details. But again, these are some some more sophisticated boards. As far as being a single computer board, they’ve got the uh.
The beaglebone has a micro controller sort of built into it. It’S got all those pins, it’s great for roboticists. It’S also got the graphics, the raspberry pi there’s a huge community and a huge support for that.
So if you want to learn more about the software and the development making computers, that’s a great platform to start with, there’s also a newer development. It’S called fpga it’s field program, programmable gate, arrays and basically you start with a blank canvas. You start with a blank processor and you can use code and actually create the architecture in the chip and control what the chip actually does, and so, as an example. If you have a project that you want to communicate over serial ports with back and forth to other devices, you can using code, create multiple serial ports so that your device can then now connect to many other devices um.
They have some great platforms going, but also with the mojo more advanced, spartan, 8 processor that’s based upon and then the programs that go along with that. So in the 15 minutes that we had um, there’s just not enough time to go over everything, that’s available, uh! There’S cnc boards 3d printer boards, you know radios and such so i would really recommend going out into the exhibit and seeing what’s out there there’s some great makers here. They have brand new boards that haven’t seen yet, and they can always tell you more about it. But thank you for your time.
I hope you guys have picked up some tips and tricks and i’ll head off stage. If anyone has any questions, but thank you. .