Use of development boards for designing electronics & embedded applications make the work simpler. These development boards come with basic framework like on board processor, some interfaces (sensors), input/output connectors, provision for connecting external power etc. They provide designer a basic platform to build new application using them without bothering about the trivial issues of PCB designing, power supply issues, need of external programmer for programming the microcontroller etc. There are a variety of development boards available for different applications ranging from agriculture to music processing etc. Design Developers frequently choose custom boards to develop solutions for their uses, or commercial applications. Most of the electronics folks are quite familiar with some of the popular development boards that are available in the market and are used for general purpose applications, couple of examples are Arduino & Raspberry Pi. However in this article I have touched upon certain application specific development boards which are equally powerful but have not got similar attention.

Bela:- Entertainment is an ever-increasing demand from the masses. So there is a board for music processing which has an embedded system for real-time audio processing built on top of BeagleBone Black, a single-board computer from Texas Instruments. It provides custom software and hardware environment including integrated audio processing and also has sensor connectivity in a single package. It can be used in projects which require ultra-fast processing of multiple streams of data.

Pinoccio board:- If design requires a solution for wireless connectivity without power consumption of Wi-Fi, we can use Pinoccio board. Atmel ATmega256RFR2 is used as core in Pinoccio development board. Pinoccio is a wireless board packed with lithium-polymer battery and has built-in radio. Each unit can communicate with one another using a mesh network for easy connectivity.

Winkel board:- It has WiFi, Bluetooth, 2.4GHz ISM & RTC on the same board. It has a compatibility with Arduino & can be used with different shields for different tasks.

UDOO :- It is a platform for Android and Linux development. It has ARM Cortex-A9 and Atmel SMART SAM3X8E ARM Cortex-M3 CPU which provides a flexible and friendly environment that allows us to work with the IoT developments.

BITalino:- It is an example of data-acquisition development board for biomedical applications used for application requiring physiological sensors and tools. This board has electromyography block, electrodermal activity block, electrocardiogram block, Bluetooth, power, accelerometer, LED and light sensor. It features a microcontroller which provides a sampling rate up to 1GHz and have capability of supporting six analogue inputs (four at 10-bit, two at 6-bit), four digital inputs as well as outputs.

Axoloti development board:- Axoloti Core is a board with stereo audio in and out, audio A/D and D/A converters and it has a microcontroller which is ideal for digital audio processing. All connectors on this device are on one side to make it a table-top device, rack mount etc. It may be connected with a PC or desktop and can be programmed via patcher.

By - Amit Monga - Asst. Prof. ECE, Chitkara University H.P.

References:-

• https://mintbox.in/winkel
• https://pinocc.io/
• www.axoloti.com
• http://electronicsforu.com/
• http://bela.io/
• bitalino.com/index.php/board-kit
• www.udoo.org/