Seeed
The team over at Seeed Studio has seemingly jumped aboard the hype train surrounding Espressif’s ESP32 MCUs. Their first foray way rather shy, testing the waters with an…
Seeed’s Wio Terminal is an all-in-one contender in the educational development kit market. By interfacing with the real world, these boards allow programs to come to life and enable students to visualise concepts easily. Dev boards are of great appeal to the hobbyist community, as well – enabling makers to create complex devices with minimal involvment in hardware design. These two communities – the education market and the maker space – have been actively utilizing this tech for over a decade now. The ease of use enabled brands like Arduino and Raspberry Pi to gain traction and their almost legendary status in the industry which they have today.
The tools available at any price point continue to evolve rapidly. In the 90s, it would cost millions and take years to build some of the hardware components we mass-produce for pennies nowadays. It simply makes sense that – a decade later – we move on from the classic bare-bones MCU board format and get something more – at least in the price bracket.
See, the price of an Arduino Uno has mostly remained the same – at around $28. It features the beloved ATMega328P, an 8-bit, 20 MHz, with 32K of flash, 2K of RAM and a whole 1K of EEPROM. It’s not a lot – but there’s a suprising amount of things which can be (and have been) done with this chip. The great support and tens of thousands of projects are what draws people towards the Uno – and what’s cemented its rightful place in tech history.