brainwagon

I have an odd obsession with small, relatively cheap hardware development boards. Over the last few years, I’ve acquired a bunch of them, from Arduino to Raspberry Pi to BeagleBone Black. I thought it might be nice to just do a short video showing what I have around. So I did. Here’s a little 25 minute video demoing what I’ve got lying around.

Here’s a bunch of links to some of the boards I mentioned:

• Arduino, the classic board. Based upon the ATMEGA328, an 8 bit processor, 32K of flash, 20Mhz. Great user community.
• Beagle Bone Black Very cool Linux based machine.
• Raspberry Pi Perhaps my favorite board, I don’t have the version 2 board yet, but the version B+ boards are really nice. I particularly like the Pi Camera boards you can use with them.
• WRTNode A very cool, very cheap Linux box, with WiFi. Runs OpenWRT, a stripped down version of Linux, but still cool.
• Wild Fire board A very nifty little board by Wicked Devices, who supplied me with a couple. During the video, I mentioned that I thought these boards were a bit expensive, but checking their website, I see them selling for about $49. If you need an Arduino compatible board with some extra punch, it’s a great little board.
• ESP8266 The tiniest and cheapest board that I had. Often used as simple serial->WiFi chips, they are actually quite powerful and can be reprogrammed. This lua based firmware is a cool example.