# General > IoT, IoE, and Maker Forum >  What Boards have you used?

## brad jones

I'm curious as to what boards people have played with. List what you've played with and what you've liked -- or not liked -- about each. What projects have you done?


I've used a standard Arduino Uno. I'm just getting started, so I've only done the basics including messing with LEDs and timings.

I'm looking forward to getting more complex projects going soon!

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## dclamp

I currently have a Raspberry Pi, 2 Arduino Unos, and an Arduino Mega. I have played a lot with the Arduino and love it. I haven't really gotten into Raspberry Pi, although it has significantly more processing power than an Arduino. 

Most of my projects with Arduino have been geared toward home automation. I am about to put my garage door controller back online and will post about it when I work on that (Probably tonight)

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## Nightwalker83

> I currently have a Raspberry Pi


Is the PI worth buying? I picked up a little book from the news agent showing how to use a code for it.

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## dclamp

I haven't gotten into it very much other than installing Debian on it and playing with it a little. But it has GPIO for low level output and sensors. 

The logic side of my arduino home automation project is a AMP stack (currently WAMP) and I think I might use the Arduino as the PHP server for it. 

For $35 its not bad.

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## wossname

I've used a bunch of different boards, including arduinos, RasPi, Beaglebone Black, and find them all to be a bit of a pain in the proverbial.  I prefer to build the circuit from scratch, it's more fun and you learn more that way.

I *strongly* recommend everyone look into the Parallax Propeller microcontroller.  The chip itself is $8 or so but it's insanely powerful.  8 CPU cores all running at 20MIPS in parallel.  It even has VGA (PAL or NTSC) output! Can be programmed in C (GCC compiler), native assembly, Forth, or even it's baked-in "Spin" interpreted language.  There's a whole load of different dev boards for it if you don't want to build your own.

The Propeller (P8X32A) is my favourite microcontroller and has incredible potential for hobbist and pro use.

And no, I don't work for Parallax  :Smilie:  I just love the chip.

On a side note, check out this I saw the other day on thar intarwebz... https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/v...uter-with-wifi

That's got to be pretty awesome for home automation.  I bought one anyway  :Smilie:

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## dclamp

I saw that board the other day as well. I think I will have to order one to see how well it works. 

Although I like arduino because its easy to use with shields. One of my arduino projects was an LED lightbar controller (warning lights for my truck back window). I created patterns for the lights and a make shift remote controller. I think created my own PCB design based on the barebone ardruino design + what I had on my breadboard. 

I could have chosen a smaller processor and made it smaller i suppose...

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## dclamp

*Researching Propeller board*

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## SJWhiteley

I have a Netduino.

It is nice to be able to program .NET into one of these devices. However, it is non-deterministic, of course, which is a shame. I'd like to piggyback a high-speed data acquisition board onto it width buffered storage, and use .NET in the Netduino to perform analysis and summary to transmit of TCP/IP or UDP.

It's a project that keeps being pushed down the list, though.

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## dclamp

> I have a Netduino.
> 
> It is nice to be able to program .NET into one of these devices. However, it is non-deterministic, of course, which is a shame. I'd like to piggyback a high-speed data acquisition board onto it width buffered storage, and use .NET in the Netduino to perform analysis and summary to transmit of TCP/IP or UDP.
> 
> It's a project that keeps being pushed down the list, though.


Just read up on the Netduino, it looks like something I need to buy and play with a little. I started learning C# this week (surprising how similar it is to PHP). I will use my new learned C# skills with this Netduino.

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## RobDog888

Ive used the Arduino board as well an off brand one that slips my mind right now that interfaced with simple arcade game interfaces.

Looking to get back into this as I have a great project that I need to do and have finished in the next couple months.

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## RobDog888

Found them: Advantech 4373 and a Phidgets boards I have also worked with.

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## Maven

> I'm curious as to what boards people have played with. List what you've played with and what you've liked -- or not liked -- about each. What projects have you done?
> 
> 
> I've used a standard Arduino Uno. I'm just getting started, so I've only done the basics including messing with LEDs and timings.
> 
> I'm looking forward to getting more complex projects going soon!


I've done some bare metal programming on the raspberry pi in ARM. IE: no OS.

But that's about it.

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## wossname

> Just read up on the Netduino, it looks like something I need to buy and play with a little. I started learning C# this week (surprising how similar it is to PHP). I will use my new learned C# skills with this Netduino.


Prepare for disappointment then.  :Smilie: 

When you put a bloated API library on a small microcontroller with low resources you'll have precious little space left for your own code.  Also the micro .net framework (or whatever they are calling it this week) is non-deterministic in time and/or execution order if there are multiple threads/processes running.

You're better off with straight C or assembler and programming the chip directly.  That way you get 100% control over everything the chip does 100% of the time.

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## ntstatic

ive used the Arduino Uno, Nano do hae the Raspberry but never got to using it ....
ive tinkered with the ESP 8266 a little and was greatly impressed i do have an ESP 32 which is better than the 8266 but never got to doing anything with it
also the STM32 or the blue pill

other than that i have worked on PIC the raw Atmels Mega 128, Tiny 85, etc...
other than the PIC wihch were a pain to program - but that was a decade ago, maybe that's changed. most are very easy to use 

Arduino is the VB of microcontrollers .... and that is comming from a person who just loves VB ..... (started with basic on spectrum in late 1980's ) so that is something

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## dilettante

I quickly abandoned Arduino after playing with an Uno.  Too underpowered and non-connected.  For the sorts of things it was good for I found the PICAXE adequate.

I moved on to ESP8266 NodeMCU boards fairly quickly.  I might have moved on to ESP32, but by then I was out of things to do that might have benefited from it.

ESP8266 is everywhere now.  A vast number of commercial IoT devices for WiFi-based "smart home" ecosystems use them.

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## brad jones

Hmmm.... Things change in 4-1/2 years.  :Smilie: 

Brad!
(That's when this thread was created.... 4-1/2 years ago....)

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## sndev

I used both Arduino and Raspberry series. But I recommend Arduino Uno. At a basic level, Arduino Uno is work best and well suited.

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