Know Your Arduino: A Practical Guide to The Most Common Boards
Arduino is a great hardware platform for anyone interested in building almost any sort of homebrew electronics project. But the huge selection of Arduino boards can make it hard for a beginner to get started. To get you started, let's go over the most common
Arduino Boards, and explain how to find one that will suit your project.
There are three broad ways to differentiate the various Arduino boards. The first is to look at the board’s processing capabilities—the microcontroller’s memory, clockspeed, and bandwidth. The processing hardware is generally entirely determined by which microcontroller chip the board uses, and constrains what kinds of software can run on that board.
The second way to differentiate between the boards is their feature set. This includes all the stuff on the board other than the microcontroller and
Microcontroller Kit, such as input and output pins, built-in hardware like buttons and LEDs, and the interfaces available on the board (USB, Ethernet, etc).
Finally, because Arduino is meant to be built into physical projects, form factor is very important. Arduino comes a variety of shapes and sizes.
With all that out of the way, let’s look at the boards 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.
Focus on:
Raspberry Pi
