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

They’ve also got good support for DSP applications 

I think of a kit as set of more than one component aimed at a limited set of applications. They generally would be too limited to qualify as a favorite platform.

One way to prove popularity is to look at what I keep in stock, although I don't stock kits - I stock platforms and components.

I stock some general purpose platform modules because of their small form factor, I/O capabilities, IDE familiarity and price. Here they are listed in order of how many I have:

Raspberry Pi Pico

PSoC4

ESP32

Spark Fun Pro Micro

I also stock a wide variety of sensors, interfaces and displays, but I wouldn't single out any of them as favorites.

I do have favorite op-amps and FETs that I also stock.

I have a lot of Raspberry Pi's but only actually buy them as needed.

I'll answer a different question: which dev kits are the least popular for me.

I am not a fan of a development kit with many headers with nothing to connect to. For example, there might be a connector for an "external display" or "camera," but no products on the market fit those connections. (Or maybe there used to be, but now they are no longer offered.) It is nice if the vendor provides those accessories, but it is also annoying when there is only one option--why not just include it in the kit then?

Related, it is also very frustrating when a dev board has "custom" connectors to access some of its signals. I put custom in quotes because, technically, they are available, but they are not a part that is normally stocked at distributors. So even making your own board to plug into it becomes an instant hassle and relatively expensive.

Out of fairness, I'll not mention the vendor who has done this on several of their recent products.

Sometimes, it seems like the product manager (or the engineers) do not take a step back and think about how a user NEW to their platform can make use of it.

Look at Renesas EK-RA boards. These boards have Arduino header, PMOD, QUIIC, MikroE and Grove connectors. Additionaly they exposed all the pins from MCU, so some of pins are exposed several times which is nice for connecting logic analyzer. At last, Renesas makes PMOD boards with their sensors, Wi-Fi/BLE modules, LTE module, ....

I do a lot of simple sensor projects that require I2C, UART, or SPI and a handful of GPIO pins, so I use the Seeed Studio Xiao boards and the Xiao ecosystem quite frequently.  The Xiao has a very small footprint (20 x 17.5 mm) and comes in many processor versions (SAMD21, nRF52840, RP2040, ESP32C3, ESP32S3) and has expansion accessories that support Grove ports, displays, RTC, camera, microphone, etc.  https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/xiao_topic_page/

Very versatile and inexpensive boards ($10 - $20).  I literally have used dozens of these.  And I've also used the Adafruit QT Pys which are pin compatible.

What advanced DSP feature of Nucleo board do you mean?

Arduino Nano, then Uno.  RP2040.  RPi.

2nd baldengineer (James) comment on the new user experience.  I don't apply for RoadTests that require me to learn a new IDE because I can't fit it into my life right now.

I have way more kits than I have time to play with.

Grove modules are popular, but very few places seem to stock the connectors and mates. Does Newark stock them? Has anyone seen a datasheet? What is the actual manufacturer's part numbers?

Hi Doug,

I received some cables when I picked up a Grove board for an Arduino a few years back.

I can't say I have seen the connectors/mates, but then I have not searched.