ningaman151:
I am curious which board(s) best meet the following criteria:-Compatibility with Arduino IDE and libraries
-Fast loop time (even for big projects with displays and such)
-Price, nano clones can be bought for less than 2 pounds.
-I/O max output current (25mA preferred to drive leds and mosfets)
-Size, Arduino nano, maple mini, and the pill boards have a compact form factor
-All of the fancy stuff(ADC, PWM, SPI, I2C, Serial, etc.)
-Power consumption(not important, just for completeness sake)
You wont find a 'faster' board that meets all the criteria.
Whilst there are 'faster' boards, ESP32 based for instance, the Arduino libraries will not all be compatible. With the 'faster' boards using different architectures this should not really be a surprise.
So whether a 'faster' board is acceptable to you rather depends on how much effort you are prepared to spend making changes or which libraries you can do without.
I have recently been converting a LoRa tracker receiver program from Atmel based original, which runs fine on Atmega328, 1284P and 2560, across to the more powerfull ESP32.
I have needed to make changes to;
SPI setup
I2C setup
Serial setup
Change LCD library, original did not work on ESP32
Cant use EEPROM for storage, used a FRAM alternative.
Could not use original SSD1306 library, Adafruit one OK.
Modification to radio library, no tone() support.
Change variable declarations from 'int' and 'unsigned int' to int16_t, uint16_t etc.
I am still having issues with the GPS Library, TinyGPSPlus, although the ESP32 is in theory running at 30 times faster than the 8Mhz Pro Mini I used originally, the library appears to be too slow to keep up with a constant feed of characters from the GPS, other GPS libraries dont appear to work on the ESP32.