2

I'm an electrical/electronic technician, I'm good with analog electrical stuff & electronics, but when it comes to microcontrollers, programming & uA, stuff start to sound Chinese to me (no offence to anyone here).

I've been wanting to get into the whole microcontrollers world for a while now, but every time I make a decision on which board to pick, I read about other "better" or newer ones, or ones with higher capabilities.

Right now I've limited my options to mbed or the Teensy 3, both being 32 Bit ARM-based boards, yet with different development environments.

I've read several article on this website & others suggesting that one should start with an Arduino Uno, but I don't want to start with that, since I don't live in a place where it's easy or cheap for me to get a new board, I need something that's gonna take me a while to outgrow, if I ever do since it's only a hobby.

Any suggestions? Do you think I should also look at AVR32 boards or other boards instead?

Yousif Jawhar
  • 81
  • 1
  • 2
  • 8
  • May I suggest: Add the Texas Instruments 32-bit ARM Contex M4F [Stellaris](https://estore.ti.com/Stellaris-LaunchPad.aspx) (available now) and M4 [Tiva C](https://estore.ti.com/Tiva-C-LaunchPad.aspx) (available in 8 weeks) Launchpad boards to your options list. Both are $12.99 including world-wide free FedEx, and both are supported by multiple free development toolchains. The Tiva C has several enhancements over the Stellaris, but shipping is deferred. Both compare favorably with the boards in your question - such as having the ARM floating point unit and support of the BoosterPack ecosystem. – Anindo Ghosh Jun 16 '13 at 15:19
  • I'd suggest mbed is a good option if you're worried about outgrowing something. The development environment is easy to get started with and if you feel you've outgrown it it's easy to export to a toolchain on your desktop. If you don't want the expense of the 1768 mbed you might like the Freescale KL25Z, which you can use like any other mbed device but is around $13. – Stephen Paulger Jun 17 '13 at 16:34
  • Thanks for your replies, I really appreciate you taking the time to reply. @anindo-ghosh those sound amazing, I think I'm gonna go for one or both. – Yousif Jawhar Jun 19 '13 at 01:37
  • @stephenpaulger I looked into KL24Z & actually tried to order it but apparently they don't ship to my country. – Yousif Jawhar Jun 19 '13 at 01:40
  • @YousifJawhar Not both: The Tiva C is basically the next version of the Stellaris, it isn't a different platform. – Anindo Ghosh Jun 19 '13 at 03:06
  • this is pretty much just an opinion question until you tell us what your needs are. – Scott Seidman Jul 17 '13 at 18:01
  • @ScottSeidman right now, I don't have any particular needs. I'm only going to be experimenting with uC's. The thing I'm gonna be mainly focussing on is connecting several microcontrollers together & dividing the processes & operations between them. It's all just educational for me to be able to move to the next step of building a bigger project which uses what I've learnt from this. In addition to that, I'm want to learn how to handle multiplexing, midi & other stuff that might sound simple to some, but are not so to me, that's why I want to get 32bit & 8bit uC's to know how each one reacts. – Yousif Jawhar Jul 29 '13 at 20:46
  • related thread [How to choose a MCU platform?](http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/37423/how-to-choose-a-mcu-platform) – Nick Alexeev Oct 16 '13 at 05:12

1 Answers1

1

When faced with the same problem, my choice was the "Electric Imp"

  • It has a similar processor to the other boards you mention
  • Wifi Internet connectivity is core to the way it works
  • It is low-cost
  • It is low power
  • It uses a standard form factor (it is mechanically identical to an SD card)
  • It is designed for large-scale commercial implementation so may lead to some work
  • It has some really useful ports including gpio and i2c (so I can connect to ready made circuits)

http://electricimp.com/

back_ache
  • 351
  • 2
  • 9