Ideal development board?

Hi Rob,

Most (all?) microcontrollers can be programmed from scratch without relying on support packages of source code from manufacturers, provided you're willing to trawl through their multi-hundred-page user guides to figure out what registers need programming. To save you time, the supplied source code libraries should simplify things but is unnecessary if you want to go it alone.

'Going it alone' is easier with simple 8-bit microcontrollers than (say) Cortex-M, but still possible with both.

An Arduino is a simple microcontroller with software surrounding it. Nothing stopping you from programming it without the

Arduino software environment.

You could use something like a Raspberry Pi but although you can do so-called 'bare metal' programming for it, it is underusing it's resources (since Linux comes with a kernel, memory management, well-proven code such as network drivers etc - difficult to re-do all of this from scratch in a reasonable time).

You'd need to examine your requirements in detail (every microcontroller can read a generic sensor and control an output for a circuit to control a motor in theory) and then pick a suitable platform. The programming tools are usually cheap. The compilers are often free. This means that you can comfortably select based on technical criteria rather than cost of dev tools and IDEs.

I think shabaz  sums it up pretty well.

If you don't mind having to use Windows, I'd recommend looking into Cypress PSoC 4 or 5LP.  PSoC is a Programmable SoC that has a processors (ARM Cortex-M0 or -M3 in this case) along with digital and analog peripherals, with everything programmable in C.

You can get a PSoC 4 prototyping board for US$4: http://www.cypress.com/documentation/development-kitsboards/psoc-4-cy8ckit-049-4xxx-prototyping-kits

or a PSoC 5LP for US$10: http://www.cypress.com/documentation/development-kitsboards/cy8ckit-059-psoc-5lp-prototyping-kit

You need a Windows machine to run the Cypress software.

Presumably you can always write your own header files whether it is arduino or some other development environment.

Check these out to see if they meet your needs:

mbed

PSoC Creator | Cypress

Atmel Studio 6

Energia

MPLABX IDE | Microchip Technology Inc.

8 Best and Free IDE for C and C++ Programmers

I don't know much about all of these environments, but Cypress has some very low cost system-on-chip evaluation modules that could likely handle your application (ARM Cortex M0 and M3)

Hello Robin,

I think shabazhas suggested the best way to go for it, if you want to do it from scratch.

However, you said that you need 'a package' and by any means if you are looking for ready-made solution and want to code in C - then you can go for development boards from mikroelektronika.

like -

PIC Clicker [PIC Clicker - Low Cost PIC Development Board supporting Click boards] or Clicker 2 for PIC [clicker 2 for PIC18FJ - Small PIC18F87J50 development board with two mikroBUS sockets for click board]

these boards contain PIC MCU [8bit] and mikrobus socket to connect different modules.

like - DC motor driver click for controlling the motor and light ranger click for measuring distance

you can code using MikroC, and directly program the controller. you can use the example code and the builtin library which will ease the process.