What Are Your Most Popular Dev Kits or Reference Design Kits?

For me the current most popular happen to be processing boards, these ones in particular: (1) Pi Pico, followed by (2) Raspberry Pi. I don't use Arduino boards all too often, although I like the new Arduino Rev 4.

Pre-Pico, I used Mbed-enabled boards a lot! They are awesome.

(1) Pi Pico: Ultra versatile. Both C/C++ SDK and MicroPython are excellent. Plus a second Pico can be used as a debugger for C/C++. Custom carrier board (Pico-Euro). Dev environment of choice: CLion

(2) Raspberry Pi: Regularly used as a test/learning box for Linux, and for developing with GNU tools (usually C/C++), plus sometimes Python. Network-only, with no keyboard or monitor attached. (Therefore, for troubleshooting, I'm glad the Rev 5 Pi finally has a separate UART/console port! Took them long enough though..).

(3) Arduino Rev 4: Low-cost development board for the Renesas RA4M1 microcontroller. Currently more likely to use the Renesas SDK+dev environment with it.

For me the current most popular happen to be processing boards, these ones in particular: (1) Pi Pico, followed by (2) Raspberry Pi. I don't use Arduino boards all too often, although I like the new Arduino Rev 4.

Pre-Pico, I used Mbed-enabled boards a lot! They are awesome.

(1) Pi Pico: Ultra versatile. Both C/C++ SDK and MicroPython are excellent. Plus a second Pico can be used as a debugger for C/C++. Custom carrier board (Pico-Euro). Dev environment of choice: CLion

(2) Raspberry Pi: Regularly used as a test/learning box for Linux, and for developing with GNU tools (usually C/C++), plus sometimes Python. Network-only, with no keyboard or monitor attached. (Therefore, for troubleshooting, I'm glad the Rev 5 Pi finally has a separate UART/console port! Took them long enough though..).

(3) Arduino Rev 4: Low-cost development board for the Renesas RA4M1 microcontroller. Currently more likely to use the Renesas SDK+dev environment with it.

It is great to see Arduino using a Renesas. Their MCUs have been suffering a bit from lack of exposure in the Arduino world.

Agree. I think Renesas is well-known within the Automotive market. So, it is nice to see their microcontrollers get wider attention.

However, it is strange to me that the Uno R4 was released before having mbed_os support.

(But maybe I misunderstood a previous Arduino statement about fully supporting mbed_os on Arm-based Arduino cores moving forward.)

shabaz said:

Pre-Pico, I used Mbed-enabled boards a lot! They are awesome.

And, you still can or maybe you still do :-)

When using Pi Pico, I tend to always go with the Arduino MbedOS option.

Other favourite Arduino/MbedOS dev boards include Arduino Nano 33 BLE and the Arduino Giga R1 WiFi board.

I've got a ton of Mbed code written over the years, just sitting idle on the cloud hehe. I'll have to make use of that sometime. 

I'd forgotten about Arduino with Mbed support. I like the normal Pi Pico C/C++ SDK a lot though, so tend to use that. Although excellent, it did catch me out recently, when a sleep_us operation didn't work within a timer interrupt and just hangs there! Kind of obvious there was a risk of that (I had mistakenly assumed it would implement it as a no-op loop for small values) and I should have checked the documentation! Anyway, the solution (in case anyone else hit this) is to replace with busy_wait_us(). Aside from that hiccup, which was more my fault than anything else, the SDK has great.