These five development boards, kits and accessories are flying off the shelves at Arrow.com. See if they’re a good fit for your next project.
1.) SensorTile Development Kit from STMicroelectronics
STMicroelectronics’ SensorTile development kit includes all you need to remotely sense and measure motion, environmental and acoustical parameters. The kit is designed to support the prototyping phases of new IoT projects and dramatically accelerate startup.
The tiny 13.5 mm square-shaped SensorTile can easily plug into your design to add sensing and connectivity capabilities through a Smart Hub solution, or it can be used as a standalone sensor node monitor to track and remotely connect to an application. The SensorTile features an 80 MHz STM32L476JGY microcontroller, Bluetooth low energy connectivity, and several motion and environmental MEMS sensors such as a gyroscope, pressure sensor, humidity sensor and even a digital microphone.
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2.) BeagleBone Blue Single Board Computer from BeagleBoard.org
BeagleBone® Blue is the affordable and complete robotics controller built around the popular BeagleBone® open hardware computer. Linux-enabled, Blue is community-supported and fully open-source. The board features the AM335x 1 GHz ARM® Cortex-A8 processor with a 512MB DDR3 800 MHZ RAM and offers the software compatibility of Debian, Ardupilot, ROS, and Cloud9 IDE on Node.js with BoneScript library.
Beyond the standard Wi-Fi, BLE, and Bluetooth 4.0, it has dedicated headers for other interfaces like UARTs, SPI, DSM2 radio and even GPS. The BB-Blue is battery-ready, supporting a 2-cell LiPo battery with cell balancing. It also offers dedicated hardware for motor control, accepting quadrature encoder inputs and providing several servo and DC motor outputs. The board even supports robotic-specific operating systems and languages such as ROS, ArduPilot, and Machinekit. The BeagleBone® Blue open source board is the easiest and most affordable way to experiment with robotics and build your very own mobile robot.
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3.) Dragonboard 410C Development Board from Arrow Development Tools
The DragonBoard™ 410c is a feature-packed development board based on 96Boards™ specification. At its core is the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 410 processor, a Quad-core ARM® Cortex™ A53 with a maximum clock speed of 1.2GHz that is capable of 32-bit and 64-bit operation. This credit card-sized board supports Android 5.1, Linux and Win10 IoT Core advanced processing power, WLAN, Bluetooth and GPS.
The Dragonboard 410C supports feature-rich functionality, including multimedia, with the Qualcomm® Adreno™ 306 GPU, integrated ISP with up to 13 MP camera support, and 1080p HD video playback and capture with H.264 (AVC). 96Boards is open platform hosted by Linaro™ serving the software, maker and embedded OEM communities. Applications for the Dragonboard 401C include robotics, smart home control, smart vending machine or even a gaming console.
4.) 7” Capacitive Touch Screen from LinkSprite
This 7-inch LCD capacitive touch screen from LinkSprite features an HDMI interface and uses standard HID protocol, so integrating it into a Linux system is a simple, straightforward process. As the perfect pairing with the Dragonboard 410C, this touch screen supports the Debian operating system (DB410C) and comes with Debian images. The screen features an 800 x 480 high resolution, back light control for lower power consumption, and it supports HDMI for display and USB for touch control. Not only for mini-PCs, this LinkSprite touch screen can work as a computer monitor just like any other general HDMI screen.
5.) DIY Raspberry Pi Digital Camera Kit from Adafruit
Create a simple point-and-shoot digital camera while exploring the Adafruit PiTFT touchscreen and the Raspberry Pi camera board. This kit comes with everything you need to get started. Just follow Adafruit’s online learning tutorial for the DIY WiFi Raspberry Pi Touchscreen Camera.
While this isn’t likely to replace your digital or phone camera anytime soon, making your own digital touch screen camera is a great learning exercise. The sleek interface even comes with a wide range of unique image filters that let you have more fun with your photos. You also have the option to use WiFi and Dropbox to automatically transfer photos to another computer for editing via the cloud. Because the code is open source, you can even customize it into something special that your regular camera can’t do.
Engineers are innovating across the country with these five dev kits and tools. They can give your project an edge too. Check back soon for more product and technology highlights from Arrow.com.