Author: haroonkhan

In contrast to the Arduino Uno, which operates at 5 V, all of the ARM boards operate at 3.3 volts, so they will run off a single cell rechargeable Li-Ion or Li-Po battery. Some of the boards, such as the MKR WIFI 1010 and the MKR WAN 1310, include a battery connector and charging circuitry…

Some of these boards have other special features. The Arduino MKR Zero has an I2S port and an SD card socket. I2S is a digital audio interface. With these capabilities, the MKR Zero can play and analyze audio files and can connect directly to other digital audio devices which support the I2S interface. In addition…

Here we introduce the ARM family of Arduino boards. These boards use three variations of the ARM core: Cortex M0, Cortex M0+, and M4. The ARM Cortex M0 core was optimized for low cost as a 32 bit replacement for 8 bit microcontrollers. The Cortex M0+ was further optimized to reduce power and adds some…

The answer to this depends entirely on what you are trying to do. Generally speaking, AVR based systems will be less expensive and simpler to design and program. On the other hand, systems that require lots of memory and faster, more complex programs are likely to be better served with ARM based devices. If you…

There is no hard definitions and many devices blur the distinction, but these are general guidelines: A microcontroller is designed to be self-contained device that can be used to control a wide range of machines. In this context it is called an embedded controller. In addition to the processor, a microcontroller will include program and…

The phrases “8 bits”, “32 bits”, and “64 bits” are seen quite frequently these days, but what do they really mean? They mean that microcontroller’s internal pathways can carry that many bits of data at the same time. At the very least, this means that whenever a 32-bit microcontroller wants to get information from memory,…

The phrases “8 bits”, “32 bits”, and “64 bits” are seen quite frequently these days, but what do they really mean? They mean that microcontroller’s internal pathways can carry that many bits of data at the same time. At the very least, this means that whenever a 32-bit microcontroller wants to get information from memory,…

Both AVR and ARM refer to families of devices. The ARM architecture was developed by the ARM company and is licensed to other companies, while the AVR architecture was developed by Atmel and pretty much stayed within Atmel (now owned by Microchip). Both AVR and ARM are microprocessors. AVR never appears as a stand-alone microprocessor,…

The original Arduino family of boards was based on Atmel AVR 8-bit microcontrollers. These devices are excellent in terms of price, flexibility, and ease of use, but the limited processing speed and small memory size make it difficult to support modern networking protocols. Arduino has taken advantage of the availability of low-cost 32-bit microcontrollers based…