In this article, I have written about some of the basic and commonly used hardware platforms for your IoT projects. Hardware platforms are the main part of your IoT project where your components are connected with that. You can compare the hardware with the feature, size, cost, power supply, etc. Most of the hardware development boards are microcontroller and microprocessors, and some of them have inbuilt sensors, come with a very small size, say a coin size.
Some boards have a high bandwidth WiFi radio and Bluetooth, also have USB embedded within the board. So there is plenty of development kits out there in the market with various features integrated within them. At the end of this article, you can be confident to choose the kind of hardware platform you will be working on your projects. Also, I have written about some advanced hardware platforms on IoT.
Here is a list of IoT development kit for your projects:
- Raspberry Pi
- Arduino Uno
- ESP8266
- Banana Pi
- NodeMCU Dev kit
- BeagleBone black (Beagleboard)
- Panstamp
- AVR IoT WG Development kit
- Avnet BCM4343W IoT Starter kit
Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi also known as RPi is a small, “Single Board Computer” (SBC) developed in the United Kingdom by a charity called Raspberry Pi Foundation. Their main aim is to educate basic computer science in the developing countries.
They had released several generations of Raspberry Pi.
- Raspberry Pi Model B (First generation) – February 2012
- Raspberry Pi Model A – February 2013
- Raspberry Pi Compute Model- April 2014
- Raspberry Pi Model B+ – July 2014
- Raspberry Pi 2 – February 2015
- Raspberry Pi Zero- November 2015
- Raspberry Pi 3 Model B – February 2016
- Raspberry Pi Zero W – February 2017
- Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ – March 2018
The Raspberry Pi was first released on 29 February 2012 with an introductory price of US$35. The System On Chip (SoC) used is Broadcom BCM2837B0 and compatible with plenty of Operating Systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Plan 9, RiscOS and Windows 10 IoT Core. The Raspberry Pi 3+ uses a Broadcom BCM2837B0 SoC with a 1.4 GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor, with 512 KB shared L2 cache. Besides, it comes with a 40 pin General Purpose Input Output (GPIO) connector.
The Keyboard and mouse can be connected with the USB, and other components such as sensors can be connected with the GPIO pins. The RPi has no built-in real-time clock, so it cannot track the time of the day. It comes with lots of accessories like Camera, SenseHat ( has lots of built-in sensors), Gertboard, Official Display and so on.
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Arduino Uno
The Arduino Uno is an open source hardware developed by arduino.cc. It is a microcontroller board based on Microchip ATmega328P microcontroller. It has SRAM memory and it uses Flash and EEPROM for storage. Its operating voltage is 5 volts, where you can plug it in your laptops for the input voltage, also you can use an external 9 volt battery as the Arduino accepts voltage from 7 to 20 volts. The Arduino Uno has 6 Analog pins, 14 Digital pins, where 6 of them provide Pulse Width Modulation output. The digital pin 13 is for LED, it works as, if the pin is HIGH the LED is ON and vice versa.
It comes with a ground pin and reset button. The open-source Arduino Software (IDE) makes it easy to write code and upload it to the board. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The environment is written in Java and based on Processing and other open-source software. This software can be used with any Arduino board.
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ESP8266
The ESP8266 is a coin-size, low cost, WiFi microchip with TCP/IP stack and a 32-bit microcontroller developed by a Chinese manufacturer called as Espressif Systems. A third-party company, Ai- Thinker manufactured a module called ESP-01, which allows the microcontroller to connect with the WiFi connections and make a simple TCP/IP connections. It has 16 GPIO pins for inputs and outputs for Voltage, ground, receiver and transmitter data, reset, chip power-down.
It also has a Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI),
The latest ESP-12E has a special feature, it has an inclusion of on-board USB-UART and a micro USB connector with a 3.3 voltage regulator to provide power to
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Banana Pi
The Banana Pi is a low cost, Single Board Computer which is developed by a Chinese company Shenzhen SINOVOIP Co. Ltd. The hardware design is influenced by the Raspberry Pi also both are compatible with each other. It runs on Operating System such as Android, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch Linux, Raspbian and NetBSD. The Banana Pi M2 is a single board computer with a quad-core version (A31S ARM Cortex-A7 Quad-Core) and supports onboard WiFi.
It supports 1080 HD video output. The SoC used is Allwinner A31, later on, they have stopped the production of the boards since the company Allwinner ran out of chips. BPI-BC95 is a NB-IoT development board with rich features and small form factor. Based on 96Boards’ specification, it runs HuaWei LiteOS, and can easily port to other Real Time Operation System.
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NodeMCU Dev Kit
The NodeMCU is an open source, single-board microcontroller, low cost, simple and smart IOT development board with a few simple Lua scripts. It gives high level interface to hardware with simple configurations. Based on the Lexin esp8266 NodeMCU development board, with GPIO, PWM, I2C, 1-Wire, ADC and other functions, combined with NodeMcu firmware to provide the fastest way for your prototyping. It can be powered by USB, with a memory of 128KByets and a storage of 4MBytes.
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Beaglebone black (Beagleboard)
The Beagleboard is a low power single board computer (not a microcontroller) developed by Texas Instruments. It comes with the ARM Cortex A8 with 128 MB to 512 MB memory and a 600 MHz to 1GHz frequency. The Beaglebone black was launched in 2013, it increases RAM to 512 MB with Linux Kernel 3.8. The BeagleBone BlackWireless is the latest version of the BeagleBone which has WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities.
You can run in any code of your own choice like python, Perl, C, C++, Ruby, JAVA, etc. It costs around US$45-$50. The advantage of this board is, it has two 46 socket headers of analog input and output pins in which it can connect to many sensors or components. Another advantage of the Beaglebone is having already installed with Linux distro. It has less GUI performance when compared to Raspberry Pi.
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PanStamp
A panStamp is a low-cost development board and it can be powered by a simple alkaline battery. it is meant for long distance range and Smart City projects as it communicates over the free 900 – 915 MHz ISM bands available worldwide. It can connect to the IP stations by
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AVR IoT WG Development kit
AVR IoT WG Development kit
The AVR IoT WG Development kit has two sensors, one is a light sensor and another one is a high accuracy temperature sensor. This board is based on the AVR microcontroller architecture and Wifi technology. It has four LEDs with two mechanical buttons, a USB powered board. The AVR IoT WG Development kit uses an Embedded Debugger called nEDBG, which is a composite USB device of several interfaces also, for on-board programming and debbuging.
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Avnet BCM4343W IoT Starter kit
The Avnet BCM4343W IoT Starter Kit is an Arduino form factor based board with a WiFi/BLE/MCU module. The arduino compatible shield has 4 GPIO pins, 3 analog inputs, 2 UARTs, SPI, 2 I2C. 3.3 voltage. It consists of a Reset push button and a user push button with 2 user LEDs and a ambient light sensor. It has a simple cloud connectivity and provides a solution for the IoT markets in the automotive, Smart Home, building and industrial segments.
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Note: If you are a beginner, you can start with Arduino Uno and Raspberry Pi to do some basic projects.
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