[non-entity]

I've been playing around embedded stuff and hardware design recently and mostly started with arduino's and esp8266/32's, but have wanted to play around with both FPGA's and ARM boards for designing more complex things.

I'm kinda lost on what ARM board to get though. This thing seems pretty cool, and others have recommended an STM32 board, but theres dozens of those in various form factors and chip features and I'm just not sure.

Anyone know a good comparison of ARM based dev boards that gives a good description of the differences and maybe recommended applications?

[akiselev]

I recommend the BeagleBone as a better starting point than STM32s. It combines an ARM processor core capable of running linux with microcontrollers so you can run Linux on the CPU and realtime firmware on the MCU cores.

If you want to get into FPGA development, I would recommend a ZYNQ based board [1] which is similar to the BeagleBone except instead of microcontrollers, ZYNQ chips combine an ARM CPU with an FPGA. I'd recommend something like the Analog Discovery 2 [2] for data capture since 90% of FPGA development is test benches and validation.

[1] https://store.digilentinc.com/cora-z7-zynq-7000-single-core-...

[2] https://store.digilentinc.com/analog-discovery-2-100msps-usb...

[wiremine]

The thing with microcontrollers in general is that they tend to come in MANY variations to support all the various use cases out there. So, it really comes down to your use case. Once you have that figured out, it's much easier to pick an ARM platform.

Most of the time people are taking about the M-series, so you want an M0, M3 or an M4. I'd recommend an M4 if you don't have something specific in mind.

The STM discovery series is an easy place to start:

https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/stm32-discovery-kits....

I'd also recommend checking PlatformIO: It's a great project that streamlines development and abstracts a lot of the details:

https://platformio.org/

To answer your question directly, here's a good start:

https://developer.arm.com/ip-products/processors

And here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-M

[zargon]

"The Amazing $1 Microcontroller" is a great place to start. It covers the main ARM micro families. Essentially you're looking for differences in peripherals, since the CPU is the same for any given Cortex M0, M3, etc.

https://jaycarlson.net/microcontrollers/

Edit: I guess if you're looking to move to "more complex" things you may be beyond the $1 chips that this site reviews.

[non-entity]

> I guess if you're looking to move to "more complex" things you may be beyond the $1 chips that this site reviews.

That's the end goal yeah, but ofc I need to learn the platforms first.