Raspberry Pi, Arduino, traditional MCU development board, how to choose? -part 2

2. Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi was developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a charity organization registered in the United Kingdom, and Eben Upton was the project leader. In March 2012, Eben Epton of the University of Cambridge, UK, officially launched the world's smallest desktop computer, also known as a card computer. Its appearance is only the size of a credit card, but it has all the basic functions of a computer. This foundation aims to elevate computer science and related disciplines in schools and make computers interesting. The Foundation expects that this computer will continue to be developed and applied to more fields in both developing and developed countries. In 2006, the early concept of the Raspberry Pi was based on Atmel's ATmega644 MCU. The first batch of 10,000 "Taiwan" Raspberry Pi "boards" were manufactured by Chinese Taiwan and mainland manufacturers.

The Raspberry Pi is a mini-computer that integrates most of the things in your computer case onto a circuit board. There are no real differences between the monitor mouse and keyboard, etc. and your computer. The operating system is not the same. This is based on Linux system. If you are not familiar with this kind of operation, the arduino starter kit is still the best choice for you as a starter.

3. the traditional microcontroller

Microcontrollers (Microcontrollers) are integrated circuit chips that use a VLSI technology to provide central processing unit (CPU) with data processing capabilities, random access memory (RAM), read-only memory (ROM), various I/O ports and interrupt systems, and timers. Functions such as counters(which may also include display driver circuits, pulse width modulation circuits, analog multiplexers, A/D converters, etc.) are integrated into a single chip to form a small and complete microcomputer system in the industry.  From the 80s of the last century, from the 4-digit, 8-bit microcontroller, to the current 300M high-speed microcontroller, it has wide application in the field of control.

Microcontroller called MCU microcontroller abroad, is to integrate CPURAMROM and so on into a single chip to form a single-chip microcomputer.

Raspberry Pi, Arduino, traditional MCU development board, how to choose? -part 1

With the continuous popularization of patch technology in 2015, breadboards are no longer as useful, and economic development has reduced the price of ready-made boards to a reasonable range. Buying ready-made circuit boards, or even using their own proofing circuit boards has become a trend.

Now, the choices before us are unprecedented. On the one hand, open source hardware camps led by Arduino and Raspberry Pi are developing in a very fast way. On the other hand, there are traditional SCM development board camps headed by STM32, 51, and S3C2440. This article mainly wants to explain in detail about how to choose between Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and traditional MCU development boards.

1. Arduino

Arduino is a convenient, flexible and easy-to-use open-source electronic prototyping platform that includes hardware (various models of Arduino boards) and software (Arduino IDE). It is suitable for enthusiasts in all levels, artists, designers, and users who are interested in "interaction." If you are a new starter, you can get to the arduino starter kit which can be found on many online stores. This kind of kit is a very useful tool for you to learn how to use the Arduino board in a quick way, and it is very affordable.

Popularly speaking: Arduino is mainly a microcontroller application development board with an AVR microcontroller as the core controller (of course, there are other cores such as the STM32 version but not the official, there are Galileo intel), or learning board, but The Arduino developers have developed simple functions and many application libraries, so that there is no need to directly manipulate the registers, so that people without a good microcontroller foundation can use Arduino to do what they want. The Arduino developers have also developed a simple IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that is to write code, compile, debug, and download the PC software, which makes it very easy and convenient to use.