

MICROCONTROLLER ROUNDUP:
HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO
KNOW
BLOG POST ● ANAT ZAIT ● MAY 22, 2018

At the core of many electronics projects and products, you'll likely to nd

some sort of microcontroller. A Microcontroller is in fact a small computer
on a single Integrated Circuit (IC).
Here at circuito.io, we’ve paid particular attention to one type of
microcontroller: the Arduino board, which is built around Atmel’s
ATMega328 chip.

The Arduino development platform is popular and accessible, making it a

1
great point of entry into the world of microcontrollers, embedded systems
and electronics in general.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. I Understand
With additional components, sockets and headers, the Arduino is easy to
get along with, and it’s capable of serving a broad range of functions.

But of course, it also has its limitations, for example, It comes with only a
xed amount of GPIO pins; it’s relatively under-powered, and it lacks many
of the features boasted by newer devices like the Beaglebone Black.
Once you've reached a certain point in your electronics expertise, you might
start feeling these limitations. And that's exactly why we're writing this post
to get you familiar with other microcontrollers and realize there's a wide
range of alternative microcontroller boards available.
The ATMega328-powered Arduino isn’t the only option available to
electronics hobbyists and developers. In fact, it's just one part of an
enormous and bustling market that provides solution to different users -
from makers tinkering in their garage to multinational corporations.

So what do the newer boards have to offer?

- First of all, they are mostly smaller and more powerful

- Wireless functionality and encryption are particularly popular among the
more recently developed boards – and you’ll be able to use these functions
without needing to expand your board with shields and other peripherals.
We’ve talked a lot about Arduino here on our blog, mainly because most of
the MCUs we had up till now on circuito.io were Arduino boards. Recently
we've decided to add another 32-bit microcontroller.
We narrowed down the list of options to 5, and asked you, our community,
to help us choose which microcontroller we should add next.
The winning board was the ESP32. This board has built-in wireless
capabilities, it's affordable and it has great documentation, and we can
really understand why you chose it.

Let's take a closer look at the 5 candidates, starting with the winning board:

1 ESP32 Development Board

This prototyping board is the work of the Shanghai-based company
Espressif Systems. It incorporates the ESP32, a microprocessor tailored
toward wearable electronics and IoT. It boasts integrated Wi-Fi and
Bluetooth, along with an array of inbuilt antenna switches, and ultra-low
power consumption.

CPU - Tensilica Xtensa 32-bit LX6 @ 240Mhz

Memory - 520KB RAM, 448 KB ROM
Wireless - Built-in WiFi and Bluetooth

Dimensions - 55.3mm x 28.0mm x 12.3mm

The company released the ESP8266 chip in 2014. Costing only a few
dollars, this small chip is able to bridge an Arduino with a WiFi network,
solving many issues that early IoT pioneers experienced.
It captured the attention of many talented engineers, who got it to co-
operate with a range of programming environments, including Arduino.
Within a few months, it's popularity started rising.

The ESP8266 does have a few downsides though: it has a small amount of
GPIO pins, only a few A/D converters, and it's under-powered.
These issues were addressed by the chip’s successor, the ESP32, which
was launched in 2016. It brought with it an improved spec sheet and the
ability to easily connect with external microcontrollers.
The central processor is a 32-bit Tensilica LX6 dual-core, clocked at
240Mhz. You’ll get just over 500kb of memory to play with, along with
support for external ash drives.
Wireless connectivity comes in the form of BLE Bluetooth and 802.11
b/g/n WiFi, bundled with a robust set of cryptographic hardware tools.
In addition, there’s an ultra-low power processor that’ll perform certain
functions while the device is in deep sleep, which makes the ESP32 an
excellent match for battery-powered projects.

Unlike the Arduino UNO for example, the ESP32 DevKit pinout has been
designed to slot directly into a breadboard and has 32 I/O pins.
This means you can basically plug it into the center of your breadboard and
you’re ready to build a circuit around it. You’ll be able to plug it into your
computer via a micro-USB socket at the far end, and there are two buttons
on the top: one for resetting the device, the other for programming.
Being housed within a QFN package, the ESP32 microcontroller boasts
enormous connectivity while still being compact and lightweight.
While it’s nowhere near as well-followed as the Arduino, it’s attracted
attention thanks to the niche lled by its predecessor. There’s a signi cant
community out there, and with Arduino IDE compatibility it’s easy to get
started.

Designing a circuit with ESP32 Dev Kit

If you want to design a circuit using ESP32 dev kit, you can either type
esp32 into the search box, or click on the "controllers" tab and locate it.
After you nd it, simply drag and drop it into the canvas. Alternatively, you
can click on the ESP32 DevkitC icon and then click ‘swap’. This will replace
the Arduino with the ESP32 dev kit. You can then add components in the
same way that you would with the Arduino; wiring, supplementary
components and breadboards will be added automatically.

For example, if you’d like to wire up a 64-pixel dot-matrix display, you can
simply drag it into position. As you can see, all the wiring and logic
conversion is automatically taken care of for you.

* The ESP32 dev kit is currently in Alpha version on circuito.io, meaning it's
not been fully tested by our team yet, and there is also no test code for it at
the moment.

2 Wemos D1 mini
Of all the development boards to incorporate the ESP8266, the Wemos D1
mini is among the most popular – thanks in large part to its attractive price
of around $6.
As the name implies, it’s a mini-sized version of its predecessor, the D1, but
it manages to cram much of the same functionality into the smaller
package, and functions like a mini Arduino with built in Wi-Fi.
CPU - ESP8266 EX @ 160Mhz
Memory - 64kb instructional RAM, 64kb data RAM

Storage - 4MB ash

Wireless - Built-in WiFi
Dimensions - 55.3mm x 28.0mm x 12.3mm
The D1 mini outperforms the Arduino UNO by an order of magnitude, and
for a fraction of the price.
The ESP8266 chip clocks in at 160Mhz, and there’s 4mb of ash memory
attached. Throw in built-in WiFi, and this becomes a worthwhile low-power
candidate for IoT developers.
The board comes with a total of 11 digital I/Os that support interrupts,
PWM, and I2C. An additional analog input, reset, and power pins bring the
total up to 16 pins. The board slots neatly onto the end of your breadboard
much like the ESP32.
The power consumption of the D1 mini is modest at just over seventy
milliamps over WiFi, which makes this board just as suitable for battery-
powered applications.

The D1 mini works with MicroPython, NodeMCU and Arduino, giving users
different programming options.

Arduino users will probably want to keep using the Arduino IDE. To do that,
you’ll need to install a free add-on, and download the corresponding le in
the IDE’s Boards Manager.
You’ll be able to convert your existing projects over to the new hardware
relatively easily, after renaming pins to the D1 mini pinout.
This is also an advantage for beginners, since they'll be able to use
Arduino’s wide library of example projects.
With ESP8266 being such popular chip, you’ll nd widespread support for
the D1 mini. On top of the fact that widely-available Arduino libraries will
work nicely with it, users will bene t from an active community that’s
always willing to lend support to new users.

3 ATTiny85
This little device from Atmel is a bit different than the other
microcontrollers on this list.
It’s not a prototyping board, but rather a bare-bones microcontroller,
without any included development platform.

Moreover, it’s just about as small as a DIP module can get. It comes with 8
legs and will slot nicely into the middle of your breadboard.

Being basically a miniaturized version of the ATMega328 that powers the

Arduino UNO, it’s capable of running the same code – and it can be
programmed using an Arduino with just a little adjustment.

CPU - 8-bit AVR @20Mhz

Memory - 512 bytes SRAM
Storage - 8K program memory
Wireless - None
Dimensions - 7.8mm x 5.3mm x 9.3mm
The ATtiny offers just 6 programmable I/O lines, and 8K of internal program
memory. This compares to the 14 digital I/O lines and 32kb of memory
found on the Arduino UNO.
Serial communication is also limited to SPI and I2C, and there’s no built-in
wireless.
Working with a stand-alone microcontroller allows you to use only the
features you need. This can signi cantly decrease the power consumption
and cost of your project.
Its small size means that the device’s power demands are very reasonable.
The ATtiny datasheet advises that it’ll draw up to 300µA (that’s microamps)
when active, falling to just 0.1µA when it’s in power-down mode.

Since it lacks a development board of its own, you’ll need an external

programmer to upload code onto the ATtiny microcontroller. If you’ve
already got an Arduino, you can use it for this purpose.

If you're already familiar with the Arduino, you'll probably want to stick with
Atmel (which is a big reason why Atmel are so happy to lend their chips to
the Arduino project in the rst place). It's a bit like Android vs. Apple users.
Once you get used to something and you're satis ed with it, why make an
effort to try something new?
The ATtiny has minimal setups that don’t require precise A/D conversion,
and which don’t need masses of I/O pins.
With that said, a few external shift registers will enable you to expand the
Tiny’s I/O capability to t the needs of your project.
Getting to grips with a standalone chip will set you on your way toward
understanding how microcontrollers interact with their supporting circuitry.
To get one to work on its own, you’ll need to supply all the voltage
regulators, capacitors, crystals and pull-down resistors that a development
board normally supplies.

4 Teensy
If you’d like to create something small but powerful, then Paul Stoffregen’s
‘Teensy’ platform offers a fantastic means of doing so.
Its construction shares much in common with the ESP32 development
board, including twin rows of pins that sprout from the underside and allow
for simple breadboard interfaces.
The twin agships of the current Teensy eet, the 3.5 and 3.6, were
launched in 2016 following a successful Kickstarter campaign.
Here are the specs of the 3.6:
CPU - ARM Cortex 180Mhz
Memory - 256K
Storage - 1MB ash

Wireless - None
Dimensions - 17.8mm x 61mm
All Teensy boards are based on a 32-bit ARM Cortex M4 platform.
The Teensy 3.6 clocks in at a whopping 180Mhz, giving it a serious
computational edge over the Arduino.
You’ll get 1mb ash memory, 256k of RAM, and 42 breadboard-friendly I/O
pins. The Teensy also has USB and Ethernet connections and a bunch of
hardware timers and serial ports.
When compared with the Arduino, the Teensy is seriously quick. Quick
enough, in fact, that most applications outside of cutting-edge machine
learning will come nowhere near testing its limits.
It’s physically longer than many of the other entries on our countdown, and
offers 25 analog inputs and 20 PWM outputs. This power allows the board
to do serious signal processing and output real-time stereo audio.
At just over 60 millimeters long, the 3.6 is larger than most prototyping
boards, and this increased surface area is what allows it to accommodate
such an impressive number of GPIO pins.
But if you don’t need the extra horsepower or pinout, then the smaller 3.5 or
3.2 boards will probably be a better option for you.

The 32-bit ARM microcontroller built into the teensy can handle USB
without the need for additional circuitry. That's why you won't need the
FT232RL (FTDI chip) found on the Arduino, which is part of the reason the
Teensy is cheaper.
Though Teensy boards aren’t Arduino products, the Teensyduino add-on for
Arduino IDE will allow many projects developed for Arduino to be easily
imported, so that simple code that runs on Arduino can, in most cases, be
easily exported to the Teensy.
You’ll only run into problems if you need to plug in a shield, or you’ve
designed your project to physically accommodate the Arduino’s form
factor. But these are problems you'd face with any other board on this list,
and in general.

5 Particle Photon
This tiny development kit is designed to help prototype and scale IoT
projects.
It’s the work of a company named Particle, who’ve produced several other
families of microcontroller development tools, including the Argon, Boron,
Xenon and Electron.
CPU - ARM Cortex M3 120Mhz
Memory - 128KStorage1MB ash
Wireless - 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi
Storage - 1MB ash
Dimensions - 17.8mm x 61mm
The Photon’s been engineered with Wi-Fi in mind. As such, it comes with
impressive wireless connectivity, and the processing power to get the best
from it.
This comes in the form of built-in 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, 1mb of ash memory
and a 120Mhz ARM Cortex M3 processor.
Its strong processing power allows wireless encryption to be bundled in
without the need for additional chips, allowing Particle to price this board at
a modest $19 (though savvy shoppers might nd one out there for
considerably less).
For the price of a Photon you get all this, along with lifetime access to
Particle’s impressive services. Like all Particle products, it’s built to work
with something called the ‘Device Cloud’, a set of specialized development
tools designed to help manufacturers organize their IoT lines. It offers
things like wireless device management and over-the-air rmware updates,
via which you’ll be able to upload code to hundreds of devices from the IDE.
And there’s a web-based IDE that you’ll be able to access from any browser
for added convenience.
Of course, if you prefer to do things the old-fashioned way, you can still plug
a mini-USB cable into the Photon and start uploading code. Dive into the
device’s rmware, and you’ll be able to switch between automatic wireless
connection (the default), semi-automatic, and manual. The latter option,
according to the documentation offers ‘a lot of rope to hang yourself with’.
However, it’s great for users who’d prefer to keep things local on boot.

If you’re used to programming in the Arduino environment, then making the

switch to Photon presents something of a steep learning curve. And since
the Photon isn't as popular as the Arduino, there aren’t quite so many
experts out there willing to lend newcomers a hand. However Particle do
have extensive documentation which partially compensates for this
disadvantage. On their website, you can nd an online guide for new users
along with a series of useful tutorials.
Moreover, the feature list is growing: a remote diagnostic tool is in beta,
which, once launched, will allow developers to check-in on units out in the
eld. This will save manufacturers the time and money spent dispatching
engineers, and it’ll provide data that’ll inform maintenance decisions, and
ultimately drive down overall costs. This alone is enough for many
developers to opt for the Photon – and hobbyists with an interest in
wireless electronics might be similarly tempted by this low-power, highly-
connectable microcontroller development tool.

Choosing the right microcontroller for

your project
We’ve covered 5 devices with extraordinary potential. They can each do just
about everything that the Arduino does, and a little more. Each of these
boards has its individual strengths and weaknesses.
Some, like the ATtiny85, offer a means of doing the same thing as more
substantial and feature-rich packages can do, but for a fraction of the cost.
If you’d like to adapt your existing projects and learn how to take them off-
board, then it’s sure to appeal.
If, on the other hand, you’d like to explore the newly-discovered and mostly-
uncharted landscape of IoT, then specially-designed pieces of kit like the
Particle Photon are worth considering. It’ll make it easy to create and
maintain circuits remotely, and it boasts the power necessary to keep your
data secure without the need for additional circuitry.
With that said, the microcontrollers listed here also have several features in
common. Each can be easily inserted into a breadboard, and thus each
makes a good t for those looking to shrink down their projects. And
they’re reasonably priced, mainly since microcontrollers have gotten
smaller and more feature-rich over the years, and sport surface-mounted
components that cram dozens of outputs into a few square millimeters of
silicon real-estate.
It’s no coincidence that support for Wi-Fi is so widespread among MCUs
these days, and that the winning device is equipped with both Bluetooth
and Wi-Fi connectivity out of the box.
Wireless technology allows us to interact with the inner workings of our
circuitry using smartphones and allows that circuitry to send emails, order
products and send diagnostic information in a manner that’s elegant and
convenient.
While your Arduino might have allowed you to keep track of the soil
moisture in your garden, your ESP32 will allow you to log that information
on the cloud and access it from wherever in the world you might be – and
all on a single device.

RELATED POSTS

BLOG POST BLOG POST BLOG POST

How to Use Arduino LDR-

a Motor Guide Controlled
db d d i ll

HOW TO CONNECT
ARDUINO WITH
AN LED MATRIX
circuito.io’s online circuit builder gives you wiring, code and IoT solutions
for Arduino projects. Purhcase your components directly with us so you
can quickly and effortlessly start prototyping.

GO TO APP

App About Us Talk FAQ Partners Terms of

service Privacy