Hey everybody,
I’m new to the community and I want to buy my first hardware to use riot on it. Has anyone some recommendations for a cheap and easy to use board?
Hey everybody,
I’m new to the community and I want to buy my first hardware to use riot on it. Has anyone some recommendations for a cheap and easy to use board?
There are a couple of good options. You could go with a Blackpill (better version of the Bluepill, STM32F1) It’s pretty cheap, but you also need a ST-Linkv2 in order to program it. If you have the money for it, I would get a couple of them, because you can flash the black magic probe firmware on it. (Alternative How to) There is also a non-standard IPv6 stack for the CC1101. So, you could get a couple of Blackpills + CC1101 and create a small network.
The nRF52832 is also a cheap MCU. With NimBLE you can run IPv6 over BLE. With a cheap Bluetooth 4.0 USB adapter you can also connect it to a Linux machine and talk to the device. In order to flash it you need a black magic probe or a J-Link. J-Link clones are also not terrible expensive.
The classic Black/Bluepill is not such a good option, STM32F1 doesn’t have USB support in RIOT yet and the chip is quite dated.
The WeAct-F411CE is a more modern option in a similar form factor, it comes with a more capable STM32F411 for which RIOT has USB support - so you don’t need any extra hardware to program and use it, the in-ROM USB bootloader can be used for flashing.
CDC ACM is still not always as stable as a ‘real’ UART, so if you want a cheap board with a debugger, the Nucleo boards are a good option.
If you want something with a radio, the nRF52840 Dongle is a great option. It doesn’t have a debugger (but has a USB bootloader), but you can leverage the very wide input voltage range of the nRF52840 if you decide to run if off batteries.
On 2022-04-26, at 20:42, Philipp Blum via RIOT notifications@riot-os.org wrote:
ST-Linkv2
The clones used to be really cheap (I got a ton at ~ € 2), but still are not expensive:
https://aliexpress.com/item/1005001621626894.html (You can still buy 5 for ~ € 20.)
If you do anything with STM32 (including bluebell etc.), you want to have a stash of these lying around. They power your little setups as well… Running GDB on these small thingies is really empowering.
(You can firmware-upgrade them with standard software from ST as well.)
My only caveat: There are two versions of this clone which look exactly the same but have different pinout. Fortunately, the pinout is printed in the aluminum shell.
Grüße, Carsten
If you want both the USB and radio support of nrf52840 (the nrf52840dongle Ben mentioned is one of my favorites) and easy access with an external debugger, the particle-xenon might be right for you, as it has a small debug connector readily soldered on, and pins rather than solder points for easy breadboarding. They’re discontinued by the vendor, but were still rather available last time I checked. Both come with bootloaders that can be used from RIOT.
If you like to have the debugger built in, you may want to go for the microbit-v2; compared to the nrf52840 dongle and the particle-xenon you lose the full USB support (it has USB but through the debugger, ie. you can debug and flash, and access a serial port, but can’t do, say, USB networking), but gain a neat small dot matrix display, a speaker (although I’m afraid my PR for supporting it isn’t through yet) and pins that can be used with conductive thread if you’re into wearables.