Microcontroller Dev Boards: What features do you like to have (or to add?)

I disntiguish three types of board usualy refered as:

• Breakout/prototyping boards. Examples: Raspberry Pi Pico, STM32 Blue Pill
• Development Kit. Examples: STM32 Nucleo, STM32 Discovery, Renesas EK-RA, Cypress PSoC Pioneer boards, SIlicon Labs Explorer Kits, Microchip Curiosity Nano, Maxim FTHR boards, Nordic nRF52, nRF53 and nRF91 devkits
• Evaluation Kit: STM32 Evaluation Kits

The first is simple. No necessary connectors, components and so on. Usualy they have exposed all or almost all pins. They are good for low-power applications because except MCU there is nothing else consuming energy.

Difference between second and thinrd is in the scope of offered feature. The last should allow user to evaluate ALL features of the MCU while the middle option allows using (smartly selected) subset of the feature. Most devkits are in second group. I guess it is because second group offer best price/performance ratio. First category is good for low-pin MCUs but for higher count MCU it became annoying. Second category offsers good onboard peripherals and allows use most of features without heavy external circuits. Third option is used for users who have needs for heavily using the MCU and need to develop firmware before make prototypes of their own huge boards. Third category is the most expensive, but this boards often contains tons of connectors, sensors, large displays, several connectivity options,... In other words evaluation board (like this one) contains everything but are expensive.

Nowadays almost every board (currently also including many board classified to first category) has onboard JTAG/SWD debugger and we do not need buying expensive external debugger anymore. It is extremely usefull benefit in comparison with boards avalaible 15 years ago.

My most favourite development kit design is Renesas EK-RA like EK-RA2L1 which I reviewed as part of roadtest: Review of Renesas EK-RA2L1 Development Board

It has very few onboard peripherals, but has lot of connectors for most commonly used interfaces: Arduino Uno compatible connector, MIkroE socket, Qwiic, Grove, PMOD. Except these connectors all pins are accessible on dedicated connectors. It is very usefull for connecting logic analyzer. I like this design very much. Other very good options is that all devekits in this serie share the same design, so if you ware familiar wiht one kit, you can freelky move to the other one. They are expensive, but Renesas offers free samples

Second boards which I frequently use are STM Discovery and Nucleo boards. Nucleo shares the samilar design pattern as Renesas EK-RA. In case of STM I like discovery boards over Nucleos because disco boards add some interesting peripherals.

Nowadays many vendors try to standardize even their breakoutable/prototyping boards. For example recently I played with Silicon Labs EFR32BG22. Silicon labs makes their explorer kits which all have the same (small) form factor, onboard debugger, MikroE socket and exposes all other pins. They use this form factor for all their MCUs no matter if they support BLE or not, are 8-bit or 32-bit and so on.

At last I like boards which has something very unique and advanced but vendor designed to offer them at very competitive price for promoting their products. For example MAX78000FTHR. I basicaly described it in my blog  Received Project14 7-segment Display Competition Reward . It is 30 USD board with advanced dual core MCU with AI accelerator, on-board debugger, camera, audio codec (+ jacks), other MEMS microphone and allows running from battery (has on-board li-pol/li-ion charger). Very few boards are so tiny, so performant, so cheap and allows so much interesting use cases. But it has other disadvantage like hard firmware development.

I disntiguish three types of board usualy refered as:

• Breakout/prototyping boards. Examples: Raspberry Pi Pico, STM32 Blue Pill
• Development Kit. Examples: STM32 Nucleo, STM32 Discovery, Renesas EK-RA, Cypress PSoC Pioneer boards, SIlicon Labs Explorer Kits, Microchip Curiosity Nano, Maxim FTHR boards, Nordic nRF52, nRF53 and nRF91 devkits
• Evaluation Kit: STM32 Evaluation Kits

The first is simple. No necessary connectors, components and so on. Usualy they have exposed all or almost all pins. They are good for low-power applications because except MCU there is nothing else consuming energy.

Difference between second and thinrd is in the scope of offered feature. The last should allow user to evaluate ALL features of the MCU while the middle option allows using (smartly selected) subset of the feature. Most devkits are in second group. I guess it is because second group offer best price/performance ratio. First category is good for low-pin MCUs but for higher count MCU it became annoying. Second category offsers good onboard peripherals and allows use most of features without heavy external circuits. Third option is used for users who have needs for heavily using the MCU and need to develop firmware before make prototypes of their own huge boards. Third category is the most expensive, but this boards often contains tons of connectors, sensors, large displays, several connectivity options,... In other words evaluation board (like this one) contains everything but are expensive.

Nowadays almost every board (currently also including many board classified to first category) has onboard JTAG/SWD debugger and we do not need buying expensive external debugger anymore. It is extremely usefull benefit in comparison with boards avalaible 15 years ago.

My most favourite development kit design is Renesas EK-RA like EK-RA2L1 which I reviewed as part of roadtest: Review of Renesas EK-RA2L1 Development Board

It has very few onboard peripherals, but has lot of connectors for most commonly used interfaces: Arduino Uno compatible connector, MIkroE socket, Qwiic, Grove, PMOD. Except these connectors all pins are accessible on dedicated connectors. It is very usefull for connecting logic analyzer. I like this design very much. Other very good options is that all devekits in this serie share the same design, so if you ware familiar wiht one kit, you can freelky move to the other one. They are expensive, but Renesas offers free samples

Second boards which I frequently use are STM Discovery and Nucleo boards. Nucleo shares the samilar design pattern as Renesas EK-RA. In case of STM I like discovery boards over Nucleos because disco boards add some interesting peripherals.

Nowadays many vendors try to standardize even their breakoutable/prototyping boards. For example recently I played with Silicon Labs EFR32BG22. Silicon labs makes their explorer kits which all have the same (small) form factor, onboard debugger, MikroE socket and exposes all other pins. They use this form factor for all their MCUs no matter if they support BLE or not, are 8-bit or 32-bit and so on.

At last I like boards which has something very unique and advanced but vendor designed to offer them at very competitive price for promoting their products. For example MAX78000FTHR. I basicaly described it in my blog  Received Project14 7-segment Display Competition Reward . It is 30 USD board with advanced dual core MCU with AI accelerator, on-board debugger, camera, audio codec (+ jacks), other MEMS microphone and allows running from battery (has on-board li-pol/li-ion charger). Very few boards are so tiny, so performant, so cheap and allows so much interesting use cases. But it has other disadvantage like hard firmware development.