Microcontroller & Microprocessor Development Boards

1. What is a development board?

A development board is a printed circuit board with circuitry and hardware designed to facilitate experimentation with a certain microcontroller. Also, certain hardware circuits greatly aid testing and debugging such as pushbuttons and LEDs. The development board price may differ in many aspects to their functionalities. 

2. Why is a development board used?

The development board is a printed circuit board used for embedded system development, including a series of hardware components such as a central processing unit, memory, input device, output device, data path/bus, and external resource interface.  microcontrollers are used in automatically controlled products and devices, such as automobile engine control systems, implantable medical devices, remote controls, office machines, appliances, power tools, toys, and other embedded systems.

3. What are the different development boards?

A development kit will serve as the brains of your project and will communicate with all the interconnected electronic components. Common development boards are 51, ARM, FPGA, and DSP development boards. An Arduino board is selected for its small size, sufficient capacity, low cost, and market availability in simple applications. Arduino Uno Rev3, Raspberry Pi 4, BeagleBone Black, and NVIDIA Jetson Nano dominate the list of leading IoT boards for prototyping. Robocraze has a wide range of the best microcontroller boards available in India.

4. What is the difference between a microcontroller and a development board?

A microcontroller development board would emphasize digital and analog control interconnections to some controlled system compared to a microprocessor development board, which might have only a few or no discrete or analog input/output devices.

5. What is the difference between a microcontroller and a microprocessor?

Microprocessors and microcontrollers are both ways of implementing CPUs in computing. A microcontroller puts the CPU and all peripherals onto the same chip, while a Microprocessor has a more powerful CPU on a single chip that connects to external peripherals.

Microcontrollers are optimized to perform a dedicated low-power application - ideal for embedded systems - while microprocessors are more useful for general computing applications that require more complex and versatile computing operations. 

The key differences between microcontroller and a microprocessor are:

1. A microprocessor consists of only a Central Processing Unit, whereas a Microcontroller contains a CPU, Memory, and I/O all integrated into one chip.
2. Microprocessor is used in Personal Computers whereas Microcontroller is used in an embedded system.
3. A microprocessor uses an external bus to interface to RAM, ROM, and other peripherals, on the other hand, a Microcontroller uses an internal controlling bus.
4. Microprocessors are based on the Von Neumann model Microcontrollers are based on Harvard architecture
5. A microprocessor is complicated and expensive, with a large number of instructions to process but a Microcontroller is inexpensive and straightforward with fewer instructions to process.