Primarily, one does look at MCU boards for their processing and memory capabilities, but nowadays most of these offer decent RAM and flash capabilities, remarks Virupaksha. He says, “This makes interface [like serial peripheral interface (SPI) and Inter-IC (I2C)] and out-of-box support offered more valuable.” He adds, “Many chips now also support a universal serial bus (USB) natively and sometimes USB host as well.”
Features such as availability of embedded wireless modules, dedicated functionality such as encryption and data logging, over-the-air (OTA) programming and mobile/cloud synchronisation are some new features to look out for, observes Anwaarullah.
ARM, with its mbed initiative, has helped programmers to have a variety of mbed-enabled boards using MCU chips from most of the ARM licencees like NXP, STMicroelectronics and Freescale, among others, notes Virupaksha. “A rich variety of features in terms of input/output (I/O) peripherals, low-power modes and hardware accelerator for digital signal processing (DSP) plus security-coupled software support make the development process a joyful ride with the latest development boards.”
Another addition to this exciting lot is Java-/Java script-enabled boards. Virupaksha adds, “Knowledge of Embedded C is no more a limitation. Traditional Java programmers can now code on MCUs. Java source code is compiled using cross compilers and programmed on to the target device.” Other higher level languages like .net are supported too. Espruino development kit can be programmed using Java scripts and Netduino using .net.
Kits featuring graphic liquid crystal displays (LCDs), thin-film transistor (TFT) displays and communication ports with onboard transceivers are popular among users. “Many users also look for onboard sensors, which may be as simple as the ones for sensing the X-Y-Z coordinate and as complicated as the ones that perform medical applications like pulse oximetry,” notes Nishant Bhaskar, embedded processing application engineer, Texas Instruments India.
He adds, “In case of power electronics based systems, customers not only look for the extent to which the power stage has been designed but also the configurability on offer, if users want to tweak it.”
