A good prototyping board with many features can save a day. As there are all you need you can instantly focus on things you need it to do. Aithon Robotics LLC wanted to make powerful but yet simple to work with ARM board which would fit most needs – especially in robotics. First of all it is based on ARM Cortex-M4 STM32F407 that features FPU. 512KB Flash and 192KB of RAM can be enough for most of applications. We don’t need to name all the features of ARM controller which actually caries lots of them.

The board itself has 15GPIOs that are running at 3.3V but are 5V tolerant. It has 8 ADC inputs and 8 PWM outputs where you can attache servos. You can see mini-USB seen as device and USB host ports, xBee socket, Bluetooth compatible header, SPI, SWD, DAC, microSD. Robotics enthusiasts will find a 3-axis accelerometer (LSM330DLC), 2 channel 5A H-bridge, alphanumeric LCD header, buzzer, couple push buttons and couple programmable LEDs. Besides great hardware there is software library available which is based on ChibiOS/RT. So it means all is opensource and free to use and modify. If you are looking for versatile prototyping board it may be great choice.

In order to explore the potential of the PIC12F683 microcontroller Raj built his own PIC development board using few components populating a 12 x 8 cm prototyping board. For some people it’s just a simple project placed on a plate with lots of holes, for some it’s just a generalized break out board for the PIC12F683. But guess what? This generalized piece of plate with lots of hole in it is packed up with feature of which some development boards could only dream of having.

It’s powered by a +5V regulated power supply, has three output LEDs that can be tapped to any GPIO ports using jumpers, also has a power switch to take things on and off, a green LED power indicator, a socket for the PIC12F683 – means no disordering when replacing the microcontroller, two potentiometers if you want to play with analog signals – one for reference while the other is for input, an ICSP header – no need to detach the microcontroller when programming, two switches for input, a TTL to RS232 level shifter, a piezo buzzer and a DC motor driving circuit – All the things you need to start your experiments.

For those of you here that always involved yourself with the AVR microcontrollers, have you ever wished to build a multipurpose development board that compatible with all type of AVRs microcontrollers, such as ATmega48, 88 or 168?

Well, you can simply use this board for testing and debugging embedded programs since it has many built-in peripherals connected to microcontroller. Thus, you can use them without even a further soldering or modification!

Ok, I know it sounds unnecessary here, but for those that never ever used any ATmega microcontrollers before, you should know that they have many great features, which as:

• Easy to adjust I/O,
• Timers,
• PWM generators,
• ADC,
• RS232,
• TWI,
• SPI,
• Analog Comparator,
• Osillator,
• EEPROM etc.

The main reasons why you should use these microcontrollers because they’re very versatile, easy to program and having an easy to use interface as well!

Since this development board has been specially designed, thus you can apply it to use with ATmega (4kB), Atmega (8kB) or ATmega (16kB).

Hope you will enjoy this development board project and until then, see ya!

Do you like using Attiny microcontrollers in your projects? In any case debugging is necessary. Atmel has a nice series of development boards available for multi-purpose debugging and interfacing. If you currently have a STK500 development board, you will face a problem because it doesn’t support any of Attiny24/44/84 chips. You have two ways: either buy STK505 adapter which is quite expensive, or develop your own.

This home made adapter supports SIP and HV programming modes and other modes that comes with STK505 adapter. If you will decide to build it here are Eagle cad files to download.