Fast Prototyping with Arduino
Doron Raifman, 2016
Arduino emerged in the recent years from being a platform for electronics enthusiasts and has become a mean for Fast prototyping and proof of concept.
It is even suitable for products produced in small quantities that hardware cost is not a significant factor, relative to the time of development.
The idea to make a platform, where everything is simple, is a wonderful idea. Take for example, servo engine control. With a micro-controller without the Arduino
libraries, the control of such motor is not a trivial task. In Arduino there is a servo motor object with a single function: Turn to the desired angle. Lovely.
It's not the only simple thing in Arduino, there are other examples such as SPI, I2C interfaces and more. Add to this, that every example includes sample code and schematics.
In some cases the sample also includes a library to make things simple. What makes the prototyping very fast.
The Arduino micro-controller is based on the AVR family. Which means basically, you can take the Open Source libraries and use them in your own boards or even third-party
manufacturers.
If you will take a look at existing libraries code, you will find the fingerprint of Google for quite a few of them. The amount of
libraries is astonishing.
The Arduino comes with a huge variety of sensors, motors and drivers of various types with application examples and source code to use them.
All this at an affordable price.
Not so long ago, the industry recognized the potential of the R3 interface, which is basically a kind of shield extension standard. Many manufacturers,
including Chinese can be found throughout the pages such as AliExpress, developed and created huge variety of low cost shields.
This has led to reality, you can take a Arduino card, pile it with GPS, Wifi, Xbee, Cellular, IMU (measuring Body angles ) and more, for a huge
variety of applications. You can very easily produce high pile of shields with large capabilities to create a quite sophisticated system with a very
small development effort.
The world didn’t stop here, chip manufacturers joined and produced System On Chip for various needs. Of course that chips can be used even without connection to
the Arduino. But with respect to the distribution of the Arduino, many vendors put the Arduino AVR core on the chip.lications.
Take for example, one of the most common Wifi chip called ESP8266. This chip contains a 32 bit AVR processor and it is compatible with Arduino. What can actually be
used without any Arduino card. They obviously added inputs and outputs similar to the known Arduino, that can be used in the same way a regular Arduino card. There is a
huge range of vendors that made use of this component. Such a card (for example SparkFun ESP8266 Thing) can be purchased at a price of about 15$. Arduino with built
in WiFi.
The ability to make Arduino-based products, without board design, makes it easy to develop fast a complete system. Micro USB connector for loading and debugging problems,
(used also to charge the battery), battery charger for Li-Ion polymer with a standard interface, holes for spacers and connectors located to enable attaching the card to
the box edge, to achieve a commercial system.
It is important to note that most of the boards come with full schematics. Thus you can design your own modified version and/or to add your circuit to your own design.
I will give some examples of boards from Sparkfun, along with pictures.
Arduino Fio V3 (red card). The card includes a micro USB connector, battery charger for Li-Ion battery, and a standard Xbee shield connector.
I want to note that this board has some design flaws.
Despite those problems, I use it for wireless control of the robot I'm developing now. The cost of the robot is tens of thousands of dollars and we produce moderate amount and therefore
the cost of the electronic parts doesn’t justify a board design.
Another interesting card is the Qduino Mini V2 ( Green card). It also contains a tiny card charging interface, Android charger standard connector. The connector locations
is completely suited to attach it to the box panel to achieve a commercial product.
Another one and the last for now, MicroView (black, with red programming adapter next to him). This tiny card includes an OLED display of 64x48 pixels. Of course there is a
library that makes it easy to draw whatever you need on the display. Built-in three size fonts. The card contains enough inputs and outputs for medium size applications.
