Introduction to Development Boards
Development Boards are the heart and soul of any electronics project. They are basically Microcontrollers that help us do our tasks. Connecting Sensors to Actuators. Make decisions based upon the input. Then provide us with a suitable output. Because of these traits, we use them in IoT projects. Furthermore, they can send data to a database like a firebase or thingspeak.
Selecting a suitable development board for your project is quite confusing. As in the last few years, hundreds of boards are available in the market. Hence, making it difficult to choose a particular board.
Choosing a board depends upon your project requirement. That how complex your task is. Also how fast data processing does your project require. Besides this, a board from the popular ecosystem ensures plenty of support. In addition to this, choosing a dev board with open source development kits is also preferable.
Some Robust Development Boards
We now know what is a IoT development board and the criteria to select one. So now, let’s take a look at some of the boards currently in the market.
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is a new addition to the Raspberry Pi family. It provides high processor speed, multimedia performance, and connectivity. In addition to that, it provides good desktop performance. Making it is one of the most popular boards for building IoT projects.
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B has different memory sizes of 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB. Besides, For storage, it has a microSD card. It has a fast Broadcom BCM2711, Quad-core ARM® Cortex®-A72 64-bit @ 1.5 GHz processor for high-speed processing.
It also has a dual display, with resolutions up to 4K, which uses a pair of micro-HDMI ports. For WiFi, it has a dual-band 2.4/5.0 GHz wireless LAN. Moreover, it supports USB 3.0, Bluetooth 5.0, Gigabit Ethernet, and PoE capability.
Finally, it has 40 GPIO pins for sensing any data and actuating.
STM32MP157C Crypto Board
This board is a member of the STM32MP157 microprocessor family. One of its prominent advantages is that this kit supports embedded Linux development. Furthermore, apart from having a processor, it also has a 3D graphics processing unit (GPU). That powers the HDMI attached LCD with a touch panel. There is even an audio codec for compressing and decompressing audio data.
It has STM32MP157 ARM dual Cortex-A7 32-bit 800 MHz + Cortex-M4 32-bit MPU 209 MHz TFBGA361 package. Hence, enabling real-time and low power mode processing. Then it has 4Gbit DDR3L @ 533 MHz of memory and microSD card storage. Unlike most of the other development boards, it has many sensing provisions. Some of them are a Touch screen, stereo headset jack with analog microphone, two GPIO expansion connectors. For Actuation, it uses 4 LEDs and an LCD. It also has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Ethernet capabilities.
NodeMCU ESP8266
NodeMCU ESP8266 is a system on chip (SoC) module. It was developed by the Espressif system and gained popularity in 2014. It is low-cost, Wi-Fi-enabled. Because of this, It is one of the most used boards for the development of IoT projects. It includes a Tensilica 32-bit microcontroller as well as normal optical peripheral interfaces. Also including Antenna switches, RF baluns, power amplifiers, low noise receive amplifiers, and filters. In addition, power distribution systems are crammed into a compact box.
The processor L106 is based on Tensilica’s Diamond Standard 106Micro 32-bit processor controller core. The clock runs at 80 MHz and can be overclocked to160 MHz. It has 64 kilobytes of boot ROM, 32 kilobytes of instruction RAM, and 80 kilobytes of user data RAM. It also has an external flash memory of 4 MB. For sensing and actuating it uses 16 GPIO. Apart from that, it has Inter-Integrated Circuit, 10-bit ADC. Serial Peripheral Interface SPI, UART. It can also provide pulse-width modulation (PWM). It also has 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n, supporting WPA/WPA2), Bluetooth, and Ethernet.
Arduino Nano 33 IoT
At the Maker Faire, Arduino modeled the board. The board is used in Internet of Things programs. It allows us to add Wi-Fi access to our ventures at a low cost. It is programmed using Arduino IDE. The board is based on SAMD21 Cortex®-M0+ 32bit low-power ARM MCU. Equipped with 32 KB SRAM and 256KB CPU Flash Memory. Moreover, supports a clock speed of 48MHz. It also has Inter-Integrated Circuit, 10-bit ADC, Serial Peripheral Interface SPI, UART. Along with 8 Analog pins for sensing. And 14 Digital pins for sensing and actuating. The Espressif ESP32 provides the board with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in the form of a u-blox NINA-W102 module. The board is compatible with the new Arduino IoT Cloud. So it can easily connect to IoT platforms.
Intel Edison
It’s a compact computing system with a small footprint. That has the ability to run a complete Linux distribution. Intel has made a number of libraries, applications, and IDEs available to help developers. In order to develop IoT projects with Edison, they must use their preferred programming language. It has a dual-core dual-threaded Intel® Atom™ CPU at 500 MHz and a 32-bit Intel® Quark™ microcontroller at 100 MHz. Having RAM of 1GB and 4GB of flash storage. With integrated WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 LE. It has 1 USB OTG controller. Also having different interfaces including UART, I2C, SPI, I2S, GPIO, and SD Card support. Hence making it a real deal for IoT projects.
The Intel Edison comes with a 70-pin socket, which makes it hard to use explicitly. Intel also made two breakout boards available to developers for fast and easy prototyping. One of the breakout boards is Arduino compliant, while the other is smaller. Despite being somewhat larger than the Edison module.
The first board has I/O pins that are Arduino Uno compliant. There are 20 digital I/O pins on the board (including four pins as PWM outputs). It has six analog inputs, as well as UART (Rx/Tx), I2C, and an ICSP 6-pin header (SPI). A Micro USB is also available.
The second board has a small range of functions, such as showing the Edison module’s default 1.8 V I/O. Through-hole solder points in a 0.1-inch mesh I/O series. A USB OTG power switch and a USB Micro Type-AB connector are included with the USB OTG. A USB to computer UART bridge with a USB micro Type-B connector is included, as well as a battery charger.
Conclusion
As stated earlier the board you should choose depends on your project. Like buying a computer to solve simple arithmetic problem is overkill, you can use a calculator for that. So buying something expensive for a simple task is pointless. One should always study the requirements and select the board accordingly.
References
Main Source
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B
STM32MP157C Crypto Board
NodeMCU ESP8266
Arduino Nano 33 IoT
Intel Edison
