Can you please suggest me an ideal board I can use for prototyping with use of Aruino IDE?
After some time and few weeks of experiments I ended with following requirements:
SRAM: 8kB
Flash: 64kB o more
MCU: AVR or ARM Cortex-M0 based, but not ESP
Board size: Sizes like MEGA or UNO are far too big, something like Arduino Mini will be great
No need for EEPROM
No need for embedded USB to UART programmer (but it is nice bonus)
What would be your suggestion please?
After some research I guess https://robotdyn.com/samd21-m0-mini.html would be ideal, but I am open for any other tips – might be some STM32 Nucleo-32 board are also compatible?
The RobotDyn SAMD21 M0-Mini seems to be Arduino M0 compatible. I think you have to use the normal Arduino IDE and set it as if it is a Arduino M0. I'm not sure how compatible the "M0" is with the other SAMD21 boards. The "M0" has its own bootloader.
If you run into trouble with a non-Arduino board, and you ask us for help, then we do not know all the quirks of that board.
Arduino is working on a board with the RP2040. That might be a good choice in the future. The first versions might still have bugs, so it might take a year or two.
Any of the SAMD or Teensy 3 (or higher) is a good bet.
Most small AVRS will not have 64k of memory.
(Although there are the new “avr128da/b” chips - I don’t know if there are any board level products that support arduino. May be the microchip “curiosity nano” boards?)
Thanks a lot for an advice. I am temporarily using MEGAs, but I will check and switch to the ZERO as MEGAs are far too big for real-world testing.
If you run into trouble with a non-Arduino board, and you ask us for help, then we do not know all the quirks of that board.
Understand. For prototyping I prefer to stay where the biggest community, well tested libraries, proven hardware and documentation is - as it means less problems...
Can you tell what your project is ?
Just playing with some ideas for sport related HW. But even those are relatively small they needs libraries for sensors, OLED, good logging support, SD card, extra EEPROM, etc. And with just few libraries it is easy to cross the 32kB boundary.
It makes no sense to fight that or try to "over optimize" own code - well code should be always at certain quality level, but above all it must be readable and maintainable. Saying that I prefer few extra kB SRAM and luxury of all C++ features over C.
A full featured 2 processor device, with one processor having dual cores, lots of ram, WiFi, BLE, comes with a multi-threading and multi processing OS built in; freeRTOS and much much more.
A full featured 2 processor device, with one processor having dual cores, lots of ram, WiFi, BLE, comes with a multi-threading and multi processing OS built in; freeRTOS and much much more.
There is so many MCU options – AVR ATmega/ATiny, ARMs, PIC, ESP, also 8051 and way too many approaches for boards to be used started from original Arduinos, through clones, boards for each MCUs listed above, recently also with Raspberry Pico…
Being beginner in a field (luckily with C++ and C64 ASM background which helps little), I prefer to stick with AVR and Arduino ecosystem for now – the community here is great, Internet sources endless (articles, forums, videos, cources), way too many books, etc. and that’s exactly what a beginner need.