Selecting the Right Arduino Board for Your Project

At the core of every Arduino-based robot is an Arduino board that can be programmed with the Arduino IDE and that runs your Arduino code. In the first three chapters, we exclusively used the Arduino Uno, which is a great board to get started. But there are many more official Arduino boards, as well as third-party boards that are not technically Arduinos but compatible with the Arduino IDE. All of these boards have unique characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses.

In this chapter, we will disentangle the characteristics that matter the most when selecting a board for your Arduino robot. It will be structured as follows:

• Important characteristics of Arduino boards
• An introduction to selected official Arduino boards
• A brief overview of third-party Arduino-compatible boards

Technical requirements

In contrast to the previous three chapters, this chapter will be mostly informative, without code examples to run.

Important characteristics of Arduino boards

Arduino boards are simple-to-use yet complex devices with many technical characteristics. It can be difficult to know what all of these characteristics mean, to understand which ones really matter for your project, and what the advantages and disadvantages are that come with them. In this section, we will shed light on the most relevant characteristics of Arduino boards to help you understand what choices you need to make when choosing between boards.

Input voltage and operating voltage

There are two voltages you need to pay attention to: the board’s input voltage and its operating voltage. The input voltage is the voltage that you can supply to the board’s power connector (if it has one) to power it. For example, for the Arduino Uno, the recommended input voltage range is between 7V and 12V. It is capable of handling input voltages between 6V and 20V, but anything outside the recommended voltage range can cause undesirable...

An introduction to selected official Arduino boards

The list of official Arduino boards is long and growing. At this point, you know what the significant differences between the boards are and what to look for when you select an Arduino board for your next robot project. Feel free to put your new knowledge to the test and see if you can narrow down your choice for a board that meets your requirements the best from the list of Arduino boards here: https://store-usa.arduino.cc/collections/boards.

Let us also look at two direct alternatives to the Arduino Uno that you are likely to want to consider at some point: the Arduino Nano and the Arduino Mega 2560.

Arduino Nano and Nano Every

Especially when you build a very small or lightweight robot, you will quickly find the Uno’s form factor a bit bulky. If otherwise the features and performance of the Arduino Uno are sufficient, the Arduino Nano can be the perfect alternative (see Figure 4.4). Just as with the Arduino Uno...

A brief overview of third-party Arduino-compatible boards

Because the Arduino ecosystem is so popular, there are many manufacturers of alternative boards that fill special niches that none of the official Arduino boards fills. Often, that means that these boards are cheaper, have special hardware, or use more powerful processors. The variety is large, and the space is quite dynamic, which makes it hard to curate a complete list of boards that you can use with the Arduino toolchain. But here is a small list to get you started in your search for alternative boards that might be just the right fit for your robot.

Adafruit Feather and Trinket M0

Adafruit is a maker and seller of a large variety of breakout boards for interesting components, and not only are their boards usually very well done, but they are also exceptionally well documented, complete with open source libraries and tutorials. Besides breakout boards for small components such as sensors, they also make development...

Summary

Once you start planning your Arduino robot, there are a lot of boards to choose from—both original Arduino boards and many more third-party, Arduino-compatible boards. After reading this chapter, you know what to look for when you choose your perfect board: operating voltage, interfaces, CPU, memory, additional hardware, size, and cost. You know what the key characteristics in these categories are, the trade-offs, and how to work around some of the limitations if you cannot find the perfect board. Have fun using your newly gained knowledge and explore the world of boards for your DIY Arduino robots!

This chapter concludes the first part of this book, in which we took an in-depth look at the core hardware components of your robot. Hopefully, you feel inspired to get your hands on some of these components and start building a robot! But before we start building physical robots, the next part of the book will teach you the fundamentals, advanced techniques, and best...

Further reading

The following resources contain many valuable pointers that let you explore this chapter’s topic further:

• A guide to selecting microcontrollers. Also, an example of the excellent educational content Adafruit produces: https://learn.adafruit.com/how-to-choose-a-microcontroller.
• A non-exhaustive but informative list of Arduino-type boards on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arduino_boards_and_compatible_systems.