March Micro Madness: Let the games begin!
I hope you have your brackets filled out because it is time to see how these dev kits fare. Each match has a randomly selected criteria. I haven't looked to see who the winners are so you are seeing the start of the games right now. (Post updated with winners. Ties will be broken by coin toss by Chris Svec).
- Raspberry Pi 3 vs. 1996 HP OmniBook: Number of processors in shippable stock as viewed on Digikey.
- Obviously RPi3.
- Raspberry Pie vs. Intel Edison: Size of RAM
- Obviously Intel Edison.
- PINE 64 vs. Raspberry Zero: Total number of processor in shippable stock as viewed on findchips
- Pine has the ARM A-53, 1113 are in stock over all the distributors at this time; Raspberry Pi Zero has Broadcom BCM2835 which has zero in stock that are not attached to a Raspberry Pi board.
- Apple IIe vs. BeagleBone Black: Lowest price of the processor as found on findchips.com
- Obviously BeagleBone Black's AM335x ($88), as there was nothing for the WDC 6502.
- PyBoard vs. Teensy 3.2: Size of RAM
- Pyboard has 192KB RAM and Teensy has 64K RAM
- Arduino Due vs. ATSAML21-XPRO: Price of dev kit at Adafruit (or Sparkfun)
- Due is $49.95 on SparkFun and Adafruit, ATSAML21 isn't on either.
- mbed LPC1768 vs. NUCLEO-F401RE: Price per MIP
- LPC1768 runs at 96MHz, costs $50 on Digikey, Nucleo has 84MHz, costs 13.83; both Cortex-Ms so MIPS is about the same. So Nucleo wins!
- FRDM-KL25Z vs. PSoC 4 BLE: Price of dev kit at Adafruit (or Sparkfun)
- TIE: Neither one of these is on Adafruit or Sparkfun
- Went straight to the vendors: NXP required me to login to find the price, so they're out. Cypress had the price easily visible: $10 in stock. PSoC 4 BLE wins. Referee call for PSoc 4 BLE!
- SparkFun nRF52832 vs. Particle Photon: Price of dev kit at Amazon
- In a squeaker upset! Photon is $19.00 while nRF is $19.95!
- OSHChip vs. ESP8266: Number of hits in google for the processor
- ESP8266 has 5,430,000, nRF51822 has 1,170,000 hits
- Blue Bean vs. Electric Imp: Likelihood of fruit filling
- The song says it is a musical fruit... Blue Bean wins and we all shy away.
- BLE Nano vs. Adafruit Feather Huzzah: Number of pixels on the device
- TIE: None for either.
- Referee: Feather Huzzah has 3 LEDs (2 available for the user), BLE Nano has only 1 - Feather wins.
- Ardunio UNO vs. Propeller P8X32A: Price per MIP
- Arduino has about 16 MIPs, Propeller is about 160 MIPS (20/cog)
- Adafruit Trinket vs. Basic Stamp 2: Number of pages of the getting started guide pdf
- Adafruit Trinket has a 50 page introduction but no getting started guide for the Basic Stamp 2 and its manual is 500 pages.
- MicroView OLED vs. Lilypad Atmega 32U4: Number of processors in stock in the first line of the first table on findchips.com
- MicroView ATmega328P had 53, Lilypad's ATMega32U4 had 1500
- BitWhacker PIC18F2553 vs. AT89STK-11: Supported by mbed compiler
- TIE: Neither one.
- Referee: 8051 wins out here, it's a real upset.