He adds, “MCU development platforms such as Arduino come with a host of free and open source libraries that help in building rapid prototypes very easily with the help of add-on shields and expansion boards.”
Application-specific development boards. Anwaarullah informs that, such boards are for dedicated tasks mostly used by companies or engineers building specific products in areas such as home/industrial automation, automotive applications and more. He says, “These development kits allow to rapidly test the functionality of the MCU as per requirements before moving on to fabricating custom printed circuit boards (PCBs).” Such boards are usually costly in comparison to generic development boards, but offer more features and a dedicated development tool chain.
Platforms like Raspberry Pi (or Raspi), BeagleBone and mbed have very high processing power running into GHz and random access memory (RAM) that expends in GBs, remarks Neha Mehta, founder, Hacktronics India. She says, “These boards run custom Linux variants and encapsulate all complexities of the external hardware into friendly programming languages like Python, for instance.”
Industry-ready development boards. Advanced processing power boards based on ARM7 or ARM9 architecture are used for industrial applications. “These include Cubietruck boards and dual-core or quad-core processors-powered Allwinner boards, which are mostly used for media processing in applications like smart televisions, media centres and digital video recorders (DVRs).”
Such boards can be used directly in real-time applications. Anwaarullah says, “For instance, Arduino Micro or Pro Mini are compact enough to be embedded inside products directly and can also be programmed on-the-go as requirements change.”
Features in the spotlight
Different MCUs have varying features and the entire development board is usually based on the supported features of the MCU. Thushar V.P., technical director, Rhydo Technologies (P) Ltd, says, “Nowadays, many development boards such as Raspi or BeagleBone support an onboard operating system (OS). Though a great feature, these boards tend to be more expensive than the ones without an onboard OS.”
