Latest MCU Development Boards Make Prototyping Easier

7/23/2019 Latest MCU Development Boards Make Prototyping Easier

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70 AUGUST 2015 | ELECTRONICS FOR YOU WWW.EFYMAG.COM

Latest MCU Development BoardsMake Prototyping Easier

E

mbedded design prototyping has

never been so easy before, exclaims

Darshan Virupaksha, systems engi-

neer, Altiux Innovations, and co-organiser,

IoTBLR. He says, Makers and do-it-yourself

(DIY) enthusiasts have a plethora of options

to suit their needs. Today, the ecosystem offers

easy access to development boards and the

most important feature is software support.

The prototyping scenario has indeed seen

an escalation and one of the biggest factors

is the range of microcontroller (MCU) devel-

opment boards out there in market. From

low-cost, entry-level boards to powerful,

application-specific ones, we try to help you

buy the right board by focusing on different

categories, new features, general selection

criteria and boards that have been in the

spotlight.

General, application- and

industrial-specific boardsQuite a few development boards in the mar-ket today are general MCU-specific, such as

STM32 discovery kits, MSP430 from Texas

Instruments (TI) or Xplained boards from

Atmel, and these are available from semicon-

ductor manufacturers themselves, informs T.

Anand, managing director, Knewron.

Local companies design some of the eco-

nomically available boards. Anand says, In

both cases, MCU development boards come

in two flavours; one is the MCU evaluation

board, where the focus is on evaluating

MCU capabilities.

Second category is application- or

feature-specific, where the board is designed

for the purpose of evaluating certain fea-

tures of the MCU and is usually focussed on

some application area, he adds.

Broadly, there are three different catego-

ries that todays MCU boards fall under.

Generic multi-purpose boards. Today,

every MCU manufacturer like Microchip,

NXP, Cypress, TI and Atmel provides an

evaluation kit compatible with their MCUs.Kanishka Shah, co-founder of Entesla, says,

International third-party development board

Abhishek A. Muthais a senior technicalcorrespondent at EFY

Some MCUdevelopment boards


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manufacturers like Arduino, Sparkfun,

Adafruit, Seeedstudio and Mikroelec-

tronika are popular among students,

hobbyists and professionals for the

quick prototyping tools they offer.

Shah adds, Development boards

for MCUs based on AVR, PIC, 8051

and ARM7 architectures are verypopular among students and begin-

ners as these are easily available in

the local market. These come with a

varying set of onboard peripherals to

suit a wide range of applications for

every budget.

These can be used for rapid pro-

totyping and smaller proof-of-concept

(POC) development. Boards such as

Arduino, MangoPi, chipKIT, mbed,

MSP430 Launchpads and STM32 dis-

covery kits, to name a few, fall under

this category, notes Syed Anwaarul-

lah, founder, PotentialLabs.

He adds, MCU development plat-

forms 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 tasksmostly used by companies or engi-

neers building specific products in

areas such as home/industrial auto-

mation, automotive applications and

more. He says, These development

kits allow to rapidly test the function-

ality of the MCU as per requirements

before moving on to fabricating cus-

tom printed circuit boards (PCBs).

Such boards are usually costly in

comparison to generic development

boards, but offer more features anda 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 encapsu-

late all complexities of the external

hardware into friendly programminglanguages like Python, for instance.

Indust ry-ready development

boards.Advanced processing power

boards based on ARM7 or ARM9

architecture are used for industrial

applications. These include Cubi-

etruck 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. Anwaarul-

lah says, For instance, Arduino Mi-

cro or Pro Mini are compact enough

to be embedded inside productsdirectly and can also be programmed

on-the-go as requirements change.

Features in the spotlightDifferent 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 Technolo-

gies (P) Ltd, says, Nowadays, many

development boards such as Raspi or

BeagleBone support an onboard op-erating system (OS). Though a great

feature, these boards tend to be more

expensive than the ones without an

onboard OS.

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 Virupak-

sha. 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, dedi-

cated functionality such as encryp-

tion 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 us-

ing MCU chips from most of the ARMlicencees like NXP, STMicroelectron-

ics 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 excit-

ing lot is Java-/Java script-enabledboards. Virupaksha adds, Knowl-

edge of Embedded C is no more a

limitation. Traditional Java program-

mers can now code on MCUs. Java

source code is translated to C source

code, which is compiled and pro-

grammed to the target device. Other

higher level languages like .net are

supported too.

Kits featuring graphic liquid crys-

tal displays (LCDs), thin-film transis-tor (TFT) displays and communica-

Why is Arduino a hot favourite in entry-level MCU boards

Popularity of an MCU development kit is primarily driven by the ease of the developmentenvironment. Arduino revolution has shown the way it has to be and has inspired many totake up embedded prototyping.

Darshan Virupaksha, systems engineer, Altiux Innovations,and co-organiser, IoTBLR

It is because of the ease of programming Arduino that gets even non-programmers

such as design students and hobbyists to tinker with MCUs without knowing advancedMCU C/C++ or assembly languages.

Syed Anwaarullah, founder, PotentialLabsArduino and its variants are perfect for beginning with programming embedded

electronics. Used mostly by students and in open source projects, these are availablewith almost every major retailer in India. Benefits of these boards are cost, availability andlibraries support. Almost all major sensors have libraries written for Arduino.

Neha Mehta, founder, Hacktronics India


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tion ports with onboard transceivers

are popular among users. Many

users also look for onboard sensors,

which may be as simple as the onesfor sensing the X-Y-Z coordinate and

as complicated as the ones that per-

form medical applications like pulse

oximetry, notes Nishant Bhaskar,

embedded processing application

engineer, Texas Instruments India.

He adds, In case of power elec-

tronics based systems, customers not

only look for the extent to which the

power stage has been designed but

also the configurability on offer, ifusers want to tweak it.

Another very important feature

in present-day development boards

from companies like STMicroelec-

tronics and TI is onboard debugging,informs Virupaksha. He says, Apart

from beginners, most users require

this feature. In fact, it is a boon for

developers, as they need not invest

in a debugger, which costs approxi-

mately `8000.

Even with all these new features,

Thushar feels, basic I/O pins, uni-

versal synchronous asynchronous

receiver transmitters (USARTs), se-

rial peripheral interface (SPI), I2C,two-wire interface (TWO), timers,

compare/capture/pulse width modu-

lation (CCP), analogue-to-digital con-

verters (ADCs) and digital-to-analogue

converters (DACs) constitute basicfeatures of an MCU, which should

always be accounted for as far as a

development board is concerned.

With increased focus on smart-

phone based connected applications,

consumers also prefer to work with

wireless MCU kits [specifically in the

Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)/

Bluetooth domain], which have some

kind of Android or iOS app to interact

with, informs Bhaskar. He says, Somecustomers also prefer to have access to

Serviceability. It is important for the boards to be repairablewhen something goes wrong. Packaging of the MCU needs to beconsidered too. It is important to examine if the MCU is a through-hole part-mounted in a socket or a surface-mounted one. If it issurface-mounted, it is important to know if it can be replaced whenthe need arises.

Pedagogy. The educational value and cognitive loading effectsof the board must be taken into account. Big and fancy developmentboards may offer tremendous number of features and look reallycool, but if these features impact a users understanding of the coretechnology, then these may be detrimental to the cause.

Reliability. One of the main goals of a development board isto ensure an operational development board for each and everyexperiment. Any time spent attempting to fix the development boardcan take away a lot of critical and important time.

Programming support/options. Newer MCUs allow in-circuitprogramming while these are located in the system. Optionsmay include an external programmer or through a self-programmechanism. Short-term and long-term consideration should be taken

in account. If the development board is utilised for other activities,these should be considered when deciding how the board will beprogrammed.

Processor support (single or multiple). If one is working onmultiple controller families or different part numbers, this factorbecomes critical, as having a separate development board for eachcontroller may not be feasible all the time. A proper decision cansave money in the short term as well as help in efficiently developingproducts or projects in the long run.

Operating voltage. Many controllers these days support multi-voltage operation and circuits could have multiple sections operatingat different voltages such as 1.8V, 3.3V, 5V, 12V or so on. Thereforedevelopment tools must support multi-voltages along with levelconverters, wherever needed.

Cost. It is an important factor. Irrespective of the value an MCUboard provides to the user, the cost should be at par.

Design control. There is nothing more frustrating than selectingan appropriate development board only to have the manufacturermake a change that ultimately forces a new development board tobe selected. It is therefore necessary to have some type of designcontrol over the development board that is ultimately chosen.

Power supply. Users would not want to buy another powersupply just to suit a certain type of development board. There

are a multitude of options for supplying power to a developmentboard including benchtop supplies, wall warts, batteries or via USBconnections. As long as the development board provides some kindof support on power supply management (whether the board hasa rectifier, switched mode power supply (SMPS) or whole powersupply on the board), its value is retained.

Debugging capabilities. Depending upon the kind of work tobe done on a development board, Joint Test Action Group (JTAG),single-wire debug or any other functionality is necessary so as toenable users do easy debugging and faster development.

System clock options. This gives the board multiple clockoptions such as an internal resistor-capacitor (RC) oscillator and/oran external crystal to be installed, which can make or break someof the developments. This is not very critical when compared to allother factors, though.

Serial port/USB connectivity. For many years, RS232 serialport connections between development boards and computershave been a norm. However, laptops with RS232 ports are almostimpossible to find nowadays. Recent trends have led to USB serial

ports as the primary connection between boards. These may be withnative USB support or in the form of serial-to-USB converters. Eitherway, this option is critical to development.

Additionally, one may want more than one communication port(COM). One of the ports can be used in project development, whilethe other can be used for debugging and other purposes. Thereforedual- or multiple-connectivity options are ideal to have.

Form factor. While development boards are ultimately usedfor development purposes, their form factor is critical. A board,which is much bigger in size and difficult to move around maynot be preferred, while a small-sized handy board, which can betaken anywhere in a pocket or a smal l box could help engineersdevelop things any time.

Readiness for final integration. Buyers also need to look for

embeddable boards, such that if they finalise a solution and time-to-market is shor t, development boards could be directly integrated intothe solution. In many cases, development boards become a per fectfit for the final product. In such cases, designing another board maynot be warranted (except when parameters like outline of board,form factor, etc are different). This becomes a very important factorsince it has high potential to save not only time but also redesignand manufacturing costs.

Courtesy: T. Anand, managing director, Knewron

General criteria to consider before buying an MCU board for prototyping


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the source files of these graphical user

interfaces (GUIs)/apps as reference for

their own development.

For developing IoT applicationsThe rapid growth of Internet of Things

(IoT) applications requires devices to

be connected to the Web. Niraj Jha,CEO and MD, Fab.to.Lab, says, Most

people would like to have an Ethernet

port or a Wi-Fi module built into the

board. The biggest feature to consid-

er for developing IoT-related products

is inbuilt connectivity.

Mehta says, It is important to

consider the kind of connectivity

options supported by the MCU like

BLE4.0, 2.4GHz wireless technology

and others.

Another important feature is the

ease of programming while using the

board. Programming becomes much

easier if the board can run Linux or

Android. For smaller processors, I

would choose a processor architecture

that is well-supported and has tons

of documentation available online,

states Mehta.

She adds, Companies like ST-

Microelectronics and TI provide

their own software development kits(SDKs), which wrap all internal hard-

ware-level details for that particular

MCU and make it easier to upgrade to

a newer processor based on the same

architecture.

Additional onboard features like

flash-to-store program, lithium battery

charger and SD card support are good

to have.

Last, power consumption and dif-

ferent sleep modes are essential. It is

important to consider environmentalfactors such as adaptability of the

board in remote locations running on

solar power, or if it can survive on a

small battery during unavailability of

power for long durations.

Since the IoT is the talk of the

town, Jha feels, some users might also

want specific features like a display,

motor/servo control for Internet-

connected robotics applications or

sometimes a combination of a relaybuilt into an IoT-ready board for home

automation applications. He says,

Boards specifically made for home

automation sometimes have other

niche features like mesh networking

built in. Other IoT boards may have

features like secured cloud connectiv-

ity built-in into its software as well.

New technologies, prospectsARM Cortex-M architecture based

MCUs seem to be the future, feels

Virupaksha. He says, Getting used

to ARM MCU architecture will be an

added advantage for any career pros-

pect. He adds, Also, mbed today

has revolutionised the development

environment by making it an online

compiler. You just need a computerand an mbed board to get started.

Pricing trends

Entry-level boards with prices starting from `800 are usually packaged with a limitedset of onboard peripherals featuring 8-bit MCUs. Intermediate development boards rangefrom `1500 to `5000 comprising 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit MCUs. There are full-featureddevelopment kits available for `5000 onwards featuring popular MCUs with a plethora ofonboard peripherals and the ability to expand to new technologies using add-on modules.

Kanishka Shah, co-founder, Entesla

As pricing can range from a few hundreds to over `20,000, it is always good to do athorough research before investing money in any of these development boards as you couldstumble upon boards with similar specifications with a much lower price tag. However, someof these boards might be Chinese-made, which might compromise on quality and reliability.So, it is always a tough bargain between pricing, features and reliability.

Thushar V.P., technical director, Rhydo Technologies Pvt LtdOwing to the great demand for development boards and the increasing interest among

the developer community, boards have seen a steep price decline over the past few years.Many sub-standard and cheap clones of these boards have also surfaced, which I wouldnever recommend as these are usually unstable and fail over time.

Syed Anwaarullah, founder, PotentialLabsIndian buyers are price-conscious and thus pricing seems to be at par for many boards

available in the market. However, the trend is changing fast. Highly capable boards are beingpriced on value based outcomes rather than just bill of materials (BOM) costs and manybuyers are appreciative of that.

T. Anand, managing director, KnewronPricing is a matter of concern for most developers today. Most mbed development

boards cost `3000 or more and a majority of these need to be imported. Hopefully, priceswill reduce in the future. Cheaper open source hardware is on the cards from many hardwarecommunities. In fact, we at IoTBLR are exploring options on collaborative efforts towardsdesigning some low-cost, open source MCU development kits for the Indian community.The variants will support mbed and Arduino integrated development environments (IDEs).

Darshan Virupaksha, systems engineer, Altiux Innovations,and co-organiser, IoTBLR

Pricing today starts from as low as the US$ 9 full-featured, ultra-powerful, cloud-readyOAK boards to Java-ready, wirelessly-programmable US$ 70 Tessel boards.

Niraj Jha, CEO and MD, Fab.to.Lab

TI development kits may be priced anywhere from as low as US$ 9 to as high as US$1000. Price point is something that is dictated solely by the kind of features the users arelooking for in their development kits. In general, evaluation kits as launchpads tend to be oflower cost than full-blown development kits.Nishant Bhaskar, embedded processing application engineer, Texas Instruments India

As such no new revolutionary

technology has emerged in the last

few years, but according to Moores

Law, the speed is always increasing,

notes Mehta. She says, Intel has

launched many new development

boards like Galileo and Edison, whichtake the leverage of Intels powerful

and trusted platform.

Mehta adds, Most technologies

used are old like Wi-Fi but are pack-

aged into newer processors and at

highly reduced costs like the ESP8266

chip, which can act as a Wi-Fi solu-

tion with an integrated MCU. Older

chips like AR9331 are packaged as

easy-to-use modules like Onion

Omega and Domino Pi boards, whichcost around US$ 10, have integrated


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Wi-Fi stacks and can

run embedded Linux.

With an increasing

requirement for ultra

low power and data

reliability, Bhaskar

feels, ferroelectric ran-

dom access memory(FRAM) is slowly be-

ing seen as a viable

replacement for flash.

FRAM offers a huge number of read/

write cycles, with lesser read/write

times and much lower power con-

sumption as opposed to flash. He

says, These kinds of devices are use-

ful in particular for applications that

have very stringent requirements on

power consumption.

He adds, TI also features a

whole host of development kits, both

general-purpose as well as applica-

tion-specific, based on our FRAM

MCUs for users to evaluate.

Developers should also look for

development boards integrated with

onboard features for different wireless

technologies like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth,

Global System for Mobile communi-

cation (GSM), General Packet Radio

Service (GRPS), ZigBee and near fieldcommunication (NFC) with a low-

power MCU and display, opines Shah.

He says, The ability to interface

different low-power technology sen-

sors like accelerometers, gyroscopes,

global positioning systems (GPSes),

temperature and humidity sensors us-

ing add-ons should be made available

onboard in future.

Boards in the spotlight and

some upcoming onesA new US$ 9 board called Chip has

recently received more than US$ 2

million in online crowd-funding, in-

forms Anwaarullah. He says, This

is a power-packed board that comes

with onboard Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and

an ARM processor. At such a low

price, building powerful connected

devices and scalable solutions be-

comes a lot easier. This board,

which starts shipping by 2016, willcreate endless possibilities.

MediaTek LinkIt ONE development

platform is one among the best, feels

Virupaksha. He says, It enables you

to design and prototype wearables

and IoT devices, using hardware and

application programming interfaces

(API) that are similar to those offered

for Arduino boards. He adds, It is a

power pack in terms of its features as

it offers Bluetooth, GSM and GPS on a

single platform and, most importantly,

in a very small form factor.

Raspi recently sold two million

boards and is a very good board for

learning basic computer programming

and interfacing with hardware. Mehta

says, Apart from Raspi, we are seeing

high traction for Wi-Fi boards with

ESP8266 or AR9331 chipsets.

mbed has been making quitesome noise with its Cortex M0 and

Cortex M3 based NXP MCU develop-

ment boards supporting cloud based

firmware development, says Shah.

He adds, Launchpad series by TI

is quite popular among developers

working on low-power battery-oper-

ated devices based on MSP430.

BLE sensor tag based on CC2541

has garnered a lot of attention ever

since it was released. It has won EE

Times/EDN Ace award for the bestdevelopment kit and was also an-

nounced as the first Bluetooth Smart

accessory to support Android (July

2013). Bhaskar says, This design

kit, while being extremely low-cost

(about US$ 25), has been extremely

popular with users over the years for

IoT based solution development.

Similarly, CC3200 Launchpad has

been of great interest among users

looking to add Wi-Fi based connec-tivity to their embedded applications.

Bhaskar says, CC3200 has been an

award-winning chipset, receiving

several accolades in 2014 such as

Electronics Products Product of the

Year, Zinnov Innovation Award and

Electronic Design Best Communica-

tion Product of the Year.

Arduino Zero definitely provides

a huge boost to the community and

provides a powerful MCU with Ardui-

no IDE support, which makes it mer-

rier to implement some complex pro-

jects, informs Virupaksha. He says,

Many crowd-funded boards using

Nordic Semiconductors nRF51822

have helped many BLE developers to

demonstrate use cases with mobile

phones and other IoT applications.

Keeping in mind the requirements

of building scalable IoT applications,Anwaarullah says, Our team has

built an Arduino-compatible Wi-Fi

IoT development board called Ref-

flion for building end-to-end IoT

solutions through cloud gateway and

mobile applications. Made in India,

Refflion can also be used by educa-

tional organisations and universities

to introduce students to build con-

nected robotics, wearables and other

IoT solutions. He says, Refflion will

soon be launched internationally oncrowd funding, and backers would be

able to get the board and shields at a

special price.

Knewrons Quickly is an IoT-ready

development board, which has all the

essentials required to develop IoT-

related products. Anand says, Alpha

version of the board is already avail-

able for sampling, and beta version

is coming out in July. This was also

featured in EFY Expo 2015 held atNew Delhi.

MAJOR CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS STORY

Darshan

Virupaksha,systems engineer,

Altiux Innovations,and co-organiser,

IoTBLR

Kanishka Shah,

co-founder,Entesla

Neha Mehta,

founder,Hacktronics

India

Niraj Jha,

CEO and MD,Fab.to.Lab

Nishant Bhaskar,

embedded processingapplication engineer,

Texas InstrumentsIndia

Syed

Anwaarullah,founder,

PotentialLabs

T. Anand,

managing director,Knewron

Thushar V.P.,

technical director,Rhydo

Technologies

Pvt Ltd

Latest MCU Development Boards Make Prototyping Easier

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