If you are a hobbyist, an engineer or a student, you might want to know the best development boards you can get started with.
After a long brainstorming session, we have come up with this list of best development boards that might help greatly with your projects. So check out this list of 10 best development boards that you can buy right now.
10. ARM Tiva C Series LaunchPad by Texas Instruments ($29.70)
TIVA CSeries launchpad is a development board from Texas Instruments. It features an on-board emulation which allows the user to program and debug without the use of additional tools. It comes with an Ethernet cable, USB debugging cable and instructions guide to set the thing up.
Additionally, Tiva C series offers the advantages of ARM’s widely available tools of great help like Soc infrastructure and a large community of users. The micro-controller features 1 MB flash memory, SSI support, QSII modules and much more.
Available here.
9. STMicroelectronics Development Board ($39.95)
STMicroelectronics development board comes with a high performance micro-controller featuring 32-bit ARM-Cortex M4 with FPU core and 1 megabyte flash memory. Board power supply goes through a USB bus. There are eight LEDs for USB communication, power, over current etc. and extension headers for interfacing with other tools and devices. Based on the STM32F407VGT6, it includes two ST MEMS digital accelerometers, a digital microphone, one audio DAC with integrated class D speaker driver and an USB OTG micro-AB connector.
A wonderful kit for DIY projects by beginners as well as hobbyists.
Available here.
8. DragonBoard410c by Seedstudio ($94.39)
With its advanced processing power, this board features Wi-Fi, Bluetooth connectivity, and GPS antenna. Supports Android 5.1, Linux based on Debian with Windows 10. The board is based on the advanced snapdragon and is designed to support fast software development and prototyping. Ideal for Internet of things because of its embedded systems.
Available here.
7. NVIDIA Development Board ($192.99)
The NVIDIA jetson TK1 development kit provides you with a platform for developing computing-intensive systems for computer vision, robots and medicine. With complete profiling tools, it also provides support for cameras and other interfacing devices. Touch SPI, general purpose input and output ports, I2C are available through expansion ports.
It is currently the best and fastest available ARM 32 bit power board that supports Ubuntu 14.04. Along with great multimedia support, you get good customer support from manufacturers.
A little downside of this board is that USB and Wi-Fi drivers are not included with the board. You might experience little problems with the pre-built packages of Ubuntu.
Available here.
6. Tessel Development Board ($48.95)
Tessel’s development board has an on-board Wifi chipset. It uses CLI (command line interface) for easy programming. Wirelessly programmable and supports Ethernet. You can build scripts in Nodejs. This board features 48MHz Atmel SAMD21 Coprocessor 64MB RAM and 32MB Flash Storage.
Available here.
5. Intel Edison ($91.99)
Edison in collaboration with Arduino makes the board magic. This board has an integrated WiFi and Bluetooth capability and supports industry standard input and output ports. It also has an open source community which can widely help developers. The board is well designed and manufactured, has a lot of memory storage.
“This thing is a real space saver as far as having all the wireless, computing power, and storage capacity all in one.” – Amazon customer review
Available here.
4. Arduino Yun ($61.49)
Perfect board to use when designing connecting devices( web-connected and networked projects). Linux supported, Arduino Yun has an open source hardware. It basically interfaces the ease of Arduino with Linux. This Yun is geared towards adding a basic OS and network/USB communication to a microcontroller.
Available here.
3. Beaglebone Black ($56.78)
Beaglebone board is another top-notch development board. It provides many expansion interfaces like Ethernet, USB host, HDMI, SPI, I2C, LCD and PWM. Great for real time input output data mining since they have more GPIO ports and an open community platform. It also uses less power than a few other boards like RPI though the processor isn’t very powerful. Not for personal computing. It’s for learning embedded development and using the GPIOs to interact with the world.
Available here.
2. Raspberry Pi ($36.00)
It has a 1.2GHzm 64-bit quad-core processor with 1 GB RAM, 4 USB ports, 40 GPIOs, camera and display interfaces, audio jack and a micro SD card slot. The new Raspberry Pi is much faster than its predecessors and is a great thing for personal computing. With an incredibly fast booting speed, it has exceedingly exceptional performance than most of the current development boards.
Available here.
1. Arduino UNO ($13.50)
Arduino UNO is one of best development boards and uses ATmega 328. It has 14 digital input-output pins. The board connects to the computer through a USB. Best board to get started with electronics and coding. Over years hobbyists, engineers, tinkerers have contributed to its open source platform and is now a platform where you can start a project from blinking an LED to making drones. With this, you get the pleasure of using a simple re-programmable micro-controller.
Available here.
