A comparison of many common Arduino types and their uses.

today I'm going to answer the question I've been getting quite a bit which is which Arduino should I use in the project that I'm working on and of course people are working in a wide variety of projects so I thought I'd show a selection of our dueños here and what the kind of capacities are so we'll start with the Arduino Uno which is pretty well the Ford of the Arduino series this is what you'll find in a lot high school robotics labs and it's actually a great place to start it's got solid connectors for you as beads got 32 K a flash 2k of RAM which means that you can run a fairly good program on it nice selection of pins but the King digital 6 analog and so on and so forth it's a good place to start and it's chief advantages would be that it's very standard a lot of code out there is aimed at the Oh No and it has these shield rails so that you can collect shields onto it and they can control motors they can write to SD cards and so on and so forth so that you know that there's gonna be a lot of standard code that will run for those shields without having to do a lot of finicky wire now often when people start to grow more advanced they're doing more than just little line following robots and whatnot they realize they needed more of something needed a more RAM they needed more flash they needed definitely more pins pins are usually premium on a lot of things so a lot of people go with the Arduino mega this thing as you can see has an amazing 53 digital pins it has over a dozen analog pins and it's still got the shield configuration so a lot of shields that would click onto the you know will also fit on here and the code often will run without any fussing and it's a good thing it's got solid connectors but where both of these start to break down and this has by the way a lot of memory as 256 K of flash so huge programs can be stored there and 8k of RAM which means you don't have to be too fussy about monitoring your memory usage for most basic programs so this is going to be used in much more advanced robot something with lots of sensors something where you're actually controlling a lot of motors on one um but now while it seems like you got a lot of pins the reality is is that if you were to try and power fifty-three bright LEDs the current capacity of this is actually not there so it would appear you can do that it can't and the reason for that is as I say you would burn this out you didn't drain too much current wouldn't work but you could control say 53 MOSFETs because MOSFETs don't the gates don't really take current and so this could actually control 56 huge motors and it would be fine but it's one of these things where it seems like it can do a lot but you might end up having to use some kind of like for instance with a lot of LEDs you'd use some kind of LED controller or whatnot which other smaller things are going to use because you're only going to need one or two pins to control the LED controller so as I say it's a good place to graduate to after learning on the uno and your project start becoming more complex but there's other places to go and so now we'll go down it will go down scale a little bit this is a mini pro they're sort of falling out of favor because the cost advantage is going away and what you had was the same processor as you find on the you know but it is a without a USB connector so what that means you have to find yourself a USB connector they're not too expensive or hard to use a little finicky to wire up but you use this usb-to-serial which then allows you to program this and in theory leave it in place but they fall in favor because they don't cost that much less then my personal favorite which is the Nano again same processors the mini in the uno so for basic robotics for slightly more advanced controllers and whatnot for most experiments because a lot of times I like to break the projects I'm working on down into smaller and smaller bits so each bit can easily run on a nano and they're cheap it's got USB great place now the teensy I'm not going to talk about much more powerful than the Nano but not they fall in a favour they're terrible price point for what they can do only time I'd recommend one would be if you need more power than the Nano can provide that is more computing power but not much because for just maybe double the price of a nano you can get this mouthful which is in stm32 f103 c8 which is a very powerful thing this the Nano the mini the uno and the 80 mega are what are known as 8-bit processors which means really when you're computing a lot of math they're not very good at it this guy here is a 32-bit processor these other four here they run at 16 megahertz this is running at 17 megahertz so when computing some difficult math the difference of 72 megahertz computing 32 bits versus 16 computing 8 is this can easily be 10 or more times faster when doing something hard so if you've got some machine learning say a neural network that's helping you do something with your robot or whatever then this can handle it now if you were to program for instance the flight controller of a drone again this has the math processing to do what's called the PID a portion of balancing a say quadcopter and the Nano really doesn't maybe if you did some awesome assembly programming or something you could squeeze it out of an endo but this can do the computing the horsepower you need for that kind of basic stuff so this is a huge step up it's got a lot more Rams a lot more flash and the 32 bits of computing power can make a big difference now if you're just doing a pump controller or something then this would be overkill but for instance a good example of where this would be different than a nano or nuna or mini or Omega is if you are controlling say an O LED screen so it's a little graphics multicolor screen maybe 200 pixels by 200 pixels these other guys could only do about 4 frames per second so it'd be jerky herky-jerky pro screen resolution or screen display where's this guy might get you up close to 30 frames a second which means it be smooth would be nice may still be very primitive but that would be the difference and this can also read from things that require that little extra bit of speed so very very sensitive high volume data throughputs can be sort of maybe within this guy's realm now going off to a bit of a strange one I've got one over here this is not necessarily what you'd ever do as a beginner but this guy's a esp8266 mo debased system with some extra little bits on it what this means is you can program this you can talk over Wi-Fi it's got a ton of pins and this particular one I'm running a web server on it and the web server can control the pins so you plug this in with some power and it'll show up on my Wi-Fi network I can go in with a web browser and actually control and this guy here is an interesting upgrade if you don't have enough compute power coming out of the rest of these boards including the STM one this guy's a good one because it's data is Wi-Fi speed so we're talking 56 megabit so you could hook this up into say a robotic system where there's a lot of sensor data coming in and you could feed that data to a desktop or laptop have it do the computing so of course you've got now your i7 or whatever crazy processor and it can go through the very huge data stream coming in process it and then send the signals back for this to control motors or whatnot so this allows you to effectively extend outside of your robot to reach out to with very very powerful things of course you don't necessarily want to have your laptop glommed onto your robot or your quadcopter or whatever and as I said this this guy could potentially also have the computing power to handle the PID that you need for a good quadcopter so now we're looking at a little bit of some other esoteric ones and these are quite useful actually I find in the final project phase this guy here is what's known as an 89 85 you buy them by the 10 pack or hundred pack they're very simple they don't have a lot of RAM they don't have a lot of flash I think it's eight K flash 512 bytes of RAM and so your programs have to be very small this would be for like a little pump controller obviously you don't have many pins they're a little bit weird to program you actually have to connect them to an you know to do the programming and they they seem scary but actually they're great for embedding in projects because they're cheap and then that way you're not leaving a bigger Arduino board and they use so little power it's crazy they just these things can run on a little coin cell battery and you have to power them directly of course you're not running it through the nice USB port but you can give them anything from about 1.8 volts up to 5.5 volts and they're happy they'll just run right along so very very useful to put into small projects but not much you wouldn't put that in to even a line following robot let alone something more advanced but here we've got sort of the big brother of the 80-85 and this guy to tiny 85 this guy is an 80 mega 328p which is the same processor as you find in enno mini the uno and it might again seem scary you have to connect it directly in but when configured properly they SEP very little power and are equally powerful so if you've programmed a robot with the uno and it's doing what it wants to do and you want to make a final version of it then rather than dedicating your own o to it you could throw one of these in there actually not that hard to program you just connect a USB to serial programmer and we've got an example of both an eighty tiny set up and in eighteen mega 328p set up and so we'll just power up the eighty tiny I've got it with a variation of the blink program service what I would call a staggered blink I programmed it through an you know and let's connect this with the rail and there we go it's unplugging itself any bit of wires for this so it's doing a staggered blink and very simple as you can see it's just a couple of power wires running in I've got this connected to a battery that's lithium battery it's putting out about just under four volts and as you can see it's happy it's powering the LED it's running well and um but you can't do we can do more than blinking a light but not a whole lot you can do some basic motor control or something like that and now we'll program or will power up this 18 mega again I'm only running a blink program but this is equally kapap it has the equal capacity to the you know and again very simple to wire up now I want to run this at 16 megahertz although if I were running at 8 I could get rid of some of the circuitry and this is a little crystal oscillator a couple of capacitors that work with the crystal this capacitor is only needed when you're programming it and then we'll pull up resistor and that's it it's um otherwise there's pins and we can look at a pin configuration here as you can see just each of these pins has a so this is what digital pin it is so here's pins 13 through 9 and then here's digital pins 1 through 6 9 through 14 and there's you can have your analog pins up here it's actually not that complicated just that it's not neatly labeled like you would find with you know or anything like that so once you've graduated from you know this is equally capacious if you want to say for what it can do but it is very very low energy because when you're looking at an unknow board for instance the all the extra circuits on the new no board actually using a power there's a voltage regulator on there and it's just used sipping away at some of the power so and so forth so you can't power in a very very low power project you don't want to be using a whole board when you could just be using one of these tiny little processors but it's equally capable and you save some money by buying these processors this way they're quite a bit cheaper and maybe half the price of nano to buy just the raw chip plus it's smaller so when you're putting it into a project if zooming you're putting it into something that you want to save every bit of space as well as the energy then it's definitely better to have one of these chips than it would be to have this big nano or definitely Nuno or mega anyway so if you are working on these different types of projects there's a variety of Arduino for your various needs and often they'll be just maybe one feature you were looking for that you needed something a bit more more timers for instance the et tiny I think it only has one timer timer maybe two and there's more timers available on the nano even more timers available in omega and then so on and so forth so it's a it's a situation where maybe there's one feature you need that's more maybe you just need all kinds of features so this guy here for instance is very capable in just about every aspect so he's a great place and I would say he's about as big processor or this guy you're ever going to use before graduating to Raspberry Pi I guess that would be the one sort of next step I should say that the I definitely have used that in robotics before where the raspberry is being hauled around and they're very energy efficient so and they're definitely have more capacity than anybody here so and the new PI's look actually pretty cool 2 pi 3 anyway if you have any questions feel free to ask subscribe and vote this up and all those things that really helps and thank you very much for watching I hope you have great success with your Arduino games

Channel: LessonStudio

Views: 149,616

Rating: 4.9075046 out of 5

Keywords: ATTiny85, ATMega328P, Mini Pro, Nano, Uno, Mega, STM32F103C8, ESP8266MOD, Teensy, Robot, robotics, electronics

Id: 7vGCouztMQk

Length: 15min 3sec (903 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 27 2016