ARDUINO BOARD

as I’ve written aboutbefore, a great hardware platform for anyone interested in buildingalmost any sort of homebrew electronics project. One of the best things aboutit is that it’s undergoing constant innovation. There are dozens of differentArduino boards on the market, so you can find the perfect hardware for any kindof project you’re working on.Unfortunately, that same huge selection ofArduinoboardscan make it hard for a beginner to get started with the platform. On theofficial site alone, there are almost 20 current- or last-gen Arduino boardslisted, and there are dozens more unofficial boards for sale on other sites.Picking the one that's exactly what you need is daunting—especially if you'renot familiar with the vocab used to describe the various microcontrollers andboards.To helpmake the process a little easier, I'm going to look at the most common Arduinoboards on the market right now, and I'll explain how to distinguish betweenthem.There are threebroad ways to differentiate the various Arduino boards. The first is to look atthe board’sprocessingcapabilities—the microcontroller’s memory, clockspeed, andbandwidth. The processing hardware is generally entirely determined by whichmicrocontroller chip the board uses, and constrains what kinds of software canrun on that board.The second way todifferentiate between the boards is theirfeature set. This includes all the stuff on the board other than the microcontroller,such as input and output pins, built-in hardware like buttons and LEDs, and theinterfaces available on the board (USB, Ethernet, etc).Finally, becauseArduino is meant to be built into physical projects,form factoris very important. Arduino comes a variety of shapes and sizes.With all that out of the way, let’s look at theboards you're most likely to want to use in your project (as of June 2013).I’ll break down the distinguishing characteristics and features of each model,as well as what kind of project that board is best for.ArduinoUno§§§§§The Uno'smain limitation is the ATmega328 chip, which doesn’t have a lot of SRAM orflash memory. That limits the kinds of programs you can load on the chip—ifyour project involves a display or otherwise needs to store and use any form ofimages or audio data, 2KB of memory probably isn’t going to be enough.