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Intel Edison with Arduino Breakout

Intel Edison with Arduino Breakout

The Intel Edison is a small system-on-module (SOM) with a dual-core 500MHz Atom main processor and an onboard Quark microcontroller (MCU) operating at 100MHz – this MCU enables real-time processing capabilities. Unlike most development boards the module offers Wi-Fi, Bluetooth low energy, and comes with 4GB of eMMC storage that ships with a flavor of […]

Next Thing C.H.I.P.

Next Thing C.H.I.P.

Last May, a largely unknown niche camera company created an uproar when it announced it had built a $9 computer. But as the Kickstarter pledges rolled in — more than $2 million from almost 40,000 backers — it seemed Next Thing Co., co-founded by Dave Rauchwerk, Thomas Deckert, and Gustavo Huber, had made an important contribution, fundamentally altering the cost structure of […]

Espressif Systems ESP8266-01

Espressif Systems ESP8266-01

The day before Makers around the world celebrated Arduino day on March 28, 2015, major news quietly hit the ESP8266 forums. A post by Richard Sloan declared that he and Ivan Grokhotkov had successfully hacked ESP8266 support into the Arduino IDE. For those following the forum this announcement was a big deal; for everyone else, it would be a week or two […]

BeagleBone Black

BeagleBone Black

This relatively inexpensive single board computer operates at 1GHz with 512MB of RAM, and has 4GBs of built-in eMMC flash storage. Augmenting the clock speed are two onboard microcontrollers, called programmable realtime units (PRUs). The PRUs are within the silicon of the main processor and can be programmed to offload realtime computation for things like robotics motor control or highspeed pin toggling used in lighting control. Each operates […]

Banana Pi

Banana Pi

Essentially, Banana Pi is a souped-up clone of the first-gen Raspberry Pis. It has an ARM Cortex-A7 Dual-core CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 1Gbps Ethernet port, and is compatible with Raspberry Pi add-on hardware.

Espruino

Espruino

The Espruino is a JavaScript-based microcontroller that boasts 44 GPIO pins, a micro USB connector, and an SD card reader. While it doesn’t have any built-in Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, it has pads that allow you to add HC-05 Bluetooth modules.