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CoAction Hero: a powerful proto-board with a 120Mhz processor, 1MB filesystem, and built-in OS for tinkerers and engineers alike.
CoAction Hero is an ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller board with a built-in operating system (CoActionOS) delivering unprecedented power and ease-of-use to your embedded projects. The embedded operating system includes many of the features you find on the Raspberry Pi (filesystem, multi-process/multi-thread) but with the ease-of-use associated with the Arduino platform. CoActionOS is available free-of-charge under a permissive open source license (Apache 2.0) that encourages both commercial and personal use.
CoAction Hero: 32-bit Open-Source ARM Cortex-M3 Board - [Link]
If you are tired of connecting the same I/O devices every time you prototype a new project then this board could save you a lot of time. All the necessary pins of the devices on the board are accessible through headers that allows easy connection of the board to a breadboard circuit or other development boards (Arduino, etc) using jumper wires.
I/O Experimenter Board (PCB version) - [Link]
The micro-sized, Arduino enabled, usb development board – cheap enough to leave in any project! Erik Kettenburg writes:
The Story: We set out to build a little brother to the wonderful Arduino line of development boards – we were tired of leaving our valuable Arduino’s behind in projects, or worse, ripping apart old projects to build new ones! We also felt the Arduino was too big and powerful for many projects where we only needed a few pins, or an SPI or I2C bus. And so the Digispark was born! To us, the best things about the Arduino is the community, the easy of use, and the IDE – by making the Digispark an Arduino compatible development board all of those remain common. Plug it in, power your project with USB or external sources, program it with the Arduino IDE, and easily use existing Arduino code! But with its small size and low cost you can feel free to leave it in your project, give one to a friend, and use them everywhere!
Digispark – The tiny, Arduino enabled, usb dev board! - [Link]
Rajendra Bhatta writes:
The 12F series of PIC microcontrollers are handy little 8-pin devices designed for small embedded applications that do not require too many I/O resources, and where small size is advantageous. These applications include a wide range of everyday products such as hair dryers, electric toothbrushes, rice cookers, vacuum cleaners, coffee makers, and blenders. Despite their small size, the PIC12F series microcontrollers offer interesting features including wide operating voltage, internal programmable oscillator, 4 channels of 10-bit ADC, on-board EEPROM memory, on-chip voltage reference, multiple communication peripherals (UART, SPI, and I2C), PWM, and more. The following project board is designed for fast and easy development of standalone applications using PIC12F microcontrollers. It features on-board regulated +5V power supply, header connectors to access I/O pins, ICSP header for programming, a reset circuit, and small prototyping area for placing additional components.
PIC12F microcontroller project board - [Link]
Derek Wolfe writes:
This is an all-in-one module for Atmel ATtiny24/44/84 8-bit microcontrollers and all necessary components to run them. Having a microcontroller module is nice because it reduces the amount of redundant design in projects using microcontrollers. You only need to provide 5V power and connect to the I/O lines to make a prototype microcontroller circuit. This design easily connects to a breadboard or a subcircuit with header pins and can also be wired directly for a permanent installation. Subcircuit design is greatly simplified by a modular approach because there are no traces blocking the way to the microcontroller pins. All traces on the microcontroller module are essentially on a different level making connections much easier.
ATtiny24/44/84 Mini Board - [Link]
coremelt.net writes:
This is an experiment board based on the new AVR ATxmega 128A1 microcontroller from Atmel. It features some nice gimmicks like an opto coupler, a RGB LED, a microSD card slot, infra red transmitter and receiver, USB, an external SDRAM and EBI extension header as well as a rotary encoder. The board has 6mil structures and hence is not home-producible (at least for the most of us). The board aims to be a general test bed for getting familiar with the new Xmega series. It could also be used as an application board.
It started out as a community project and I am about to spread about 100 pieces of this board into the crowd. We can expect some external contributions mostly in form of example code, which is rare at the moment. Although Atmel announced the MCU well over a year ago it is now that the first models become available in small quantities. This edgy character also establishes itself when it comes to the toolchain and programming tools and costs a lot of effort.
ATxmega128a1 development board - [Link]
This is a development board for the PIC18F2550, I designed this board inspired by the TP-2550 development board by Giovanni Lafebre (site is in Spanish). Main difference between the original and my design is the size, mine is 10×8 cm, so it has less elements. This is because I created this board using the free version of Eagle, so I adjusted to its restrictions. [via]
Eaglefree18f2550 features:
- 8 LEDs.
- 4 push buttons with pull-down 220Ω resistors.
- 2 potentiometers.
- 1 relay with an active LED indicator. For using the relay, you must provide an external power supply.
- 1 H bridge.
- 1 barrel connector for H bridge power supply.
- The board can be supplied from the USB or from an external supply (jumper selectable).
- 5V regulator onboard.
- ICSP port for PIC programming.
- Jumper for enabling/disabling programmer voltage. This allows for the programmer to be powered from the board supply, so we can have the programmer plugged to the board all the time.
Eaglefree PIC18F2550 development board - [Link]
dangerousprototypes.com writes:
Here is a breakout board for the PIC16F87X microcontrollers. It has a onboard 5V power supply, a 20MHz crystal, and a reset button, while all the IO pins have been broken out into a single row header, so its easy to interface with a breadboard. The UART and ICSP programing header have been broken out on the top of the board.
As a bonus this board has a RS-232 level translator daughter board for easier interface with a computer serial port. The board can be built with the daughter board attached or without it.
nedoCPU-16: PIC16F87X breakout board - [via]
Arup wrote a guest post about his Nokia LCD breakout board:
I designed a simple Nokia LCD Breakout board which allows you to interface any Nokia 6100 compatible display to microcontroller like PIC and AVR. The board itself provides 6.8volts for the backlight by a simple boost converter built up using a common 555 timer IC. There’s a switch to choose whether you want to work with 5V logic, or with 3.3V logic. [via]
Simple Nokia LCD breakout board - [Link]
dangerousprototypes.com writes:
Phil made a DIY breakout board for the PIC16F883 microcontroller. The board uses a surface-mount single-layer design, and the parts are nicely spaced. It’s an easy board to make at home using the DIY toner-transfer method of PCB etching. You can download the source files and other design data from his site.
DIY PIC16F883 breakout board - [Link]
