How to choose the best MCU depending on the projects
First touch
For those who are getting their hands on MCUs(microcontroller units) and SBCs(single board computers) you should know that a MCU is a SBC is a computer itself but with less additional components and a significantly smaller amount of memory and storage.
Taking into consideration that you never touched a microcontroller before and never worked with electronics or maybe very few and didn’t understand very well what was going on my strong suggestion would be an arduino UNO R3, the favorite of both beginners and some intermediate an advanced electronics geeks and you’ll get sound results due to amazingly well maintained documentation and very large community around it.
Communication
A very fancy and common topic is the communication. There is a large palette of protocols such as Bluetooth and especially BLE(Bluetooth Low Energy) among electronics enthusiasts, WiFi and RF(Radio Frequency).
If you are into that too, a very nice and cool option is NodeMCU ESP8266, where the name ESP8266 is the MCU of the board. The company which produces it is called NodeMCU and is specialised on delivering boards with top RF controllers like those ESP8266. Moreover, there are a lot of pins — 17 GPIO(General Purpose Input/Output) pins and they include the hardware interfaces you could hope for: 2 SPIs, 1 I2C, 2 I2Ss and 2 UARTs . Additionally, you have a modern USB type C port for both charging and data transfer.
The board including the ESP8266 microcontroller doesn’t offer BLE too, but it is fair accordingly to its price, if you want the Bluetooth interface you should opt for the more expensive chip ESP32. Also, a very nice project is to host your home webserver on this cute tiny board. I’ve tried once myself, you should try too!
Compact size
Here we have another aspect that matters — you could be working on a hackathon project or personal one. If the space is crucial or the width, then the previous options are not appealing for you. Delivering compact-sized boards implies a lot of precaution for PCB design as you have to pick up only the most important components.
first option
The first board that I recommend is Raspberry Pi Pico; somewhat more expensive brand, indeed. Nevertheless it makes its job done ’cause there is a lot of documentation out there. It has a dual-core Arm Cortex-M0 controller unit. It has 2 MB flash and Micro USB connector.
On the other hand working with a tiny board obviously implies the painstakingly job to solder your pin headers yourself. Unfortunately these boards are thought for being put directly on prototyping boards.
second option
The second option would a brand-new company which manufacturers its products in their homeland Romania, and the prices are smaller overall. It is called GroundStudio and they are focusing on Open Hardware, an initiative to share publicly with the users the datasheets and specifications of the boards, similarly to the way Open Source Code works.
My chosen board among their products is GroundStudio Marble Pico. Comparatively to the board from above, it has 8MB flash( x4 more), it has microSD adaptor and USB-C connector.
tiny desktop
If you wish for a few GBs of RAM and peripheral ports including two ports of Micro HDMI, one of Gigabit Ethernet and also 2 USBs, this is what you call a smaller desktop environment with integrated video and audio and no display.
For such a performance I chose Raspberry PI 4, a model which comes in 4 RAM memory options — 1/2/4/8 GBs and the pirces range from a 35$ to 120$ depending on the specs and the distributor.
Long story short, it is one of the most powerful SBCs out there on the market. The size is very reduced and the number of ports is impressive compared to its size. It is extremely versatile, but with the lateral cost of being expensive.
Thanks
Thanks for reading my article. I hope you liked it and I would appreciate if you would leave a comment or a clap. Also if you have more ideas of boards or other topics you want to read on, write to me. See you next time!
