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Ideal development board?

Former Member

Hello

 

I'm looking for a cheap development board to use as a small part of my final year project.  I need to use the GPIOs to read a distance sensor and control a motor at various speeds.  I need a package that is all in with programming suite etc and I would like to code in C.  However, I need something that doesn't have all the header files etc for all the functions like Arduino does, I would like to attempt to do this from scratch.  Any help would be much appreciated.

 

Thanks

 

Rob

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    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.

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  • 0

    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.

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