Development boards are actually quite interesting, as they are commonly found in our daily lives.

A development board is a circuit board based on a chip, designed to facilitate our development work. This means that, theoretically, any device controlled by a program and chip will have a development board used during its research and development phase. Nowadays, development boards have become commercial products, which can directly serve as the main board of some electronic devices. This reduces our workload in development and can even serve directly as the main board of certain devices.

In this article, I will introduce several applications of development boards.

First, from a hardware perspective, the range of chips on development boards is very broad, covering everything from remote-controlled cars for kids to routers, tablets, and smartphones. Currently, the peak performance of development boards is likely on par with high-end smartphone capabilities and NVIDIA’s Orin development board.

Is there anything beyond that? Yes, there are various computer motherboards and server motherboards. If you want to pursue that level of performance, you first need to have the corresponding skills and capital to qualify for designing and developing them. Let’s not talk about distant examples; Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC development boards and NVIDIA AGX series are currently the most expensive development boards that consumers can directly purchase.

Both of these are based on the ARM architecture, which you can consider as currently dominating the development board market.

Let’s not go too far and just mention that in our daily lives, almost any device labeled as smart has a chip inside. For example, smart home devices typically use chips that have corresponding development boards. For instance, in Xiaomi’s smart home ecosystem, various smart home development boards are officially listed, including commonly used ESP32 and ESP32-C3 development boards.

There is also a category of products where the chips for various set-top boxes generally have corresponding development boards. Currently, many set-top boxes are based on commonly used RK3528, RK3566, and RK3588S chips, and there are also many low-end set-top boxes based on Allwinner H618 and H616. The most prevalent are actually set-top boxes based on Amlogic chips, with many also based on development boards like S905.

Additionally, slightly lower-end tablets also use widely used development board chips. The chips in some tablets are often released first, and later corresponding development boards may appear.

For example, in a field that many people may not notice, e-book readers now widely use RK3566 chips, and RK3566 development boards are quite common. If you buy a development board and check the specifications, it should indicate four-core A55, 1.8GHz, which likely corresponds to RK3566.

Almost all 3D printer motherboards use development board chips, and there are now dedicated development boards for 3D printers available for sale.

In the DIY field, you can say that any open-source design or electronic DIY project control chip is almost always a development board, especially in previous electronic art projects, many used Arduino.

Various smart car competitions, RoboMaster competitions, and various technology innovation competitions all utilize a development board for programming.

Now, some schools even use development boards connected to monitors instead of large hosts during classes.

When we step out of the family, personal, and educational fields, you will find more applications for development boards. For example, the cash registers used in supermarkets often utilize a mainboard inside. Previously, they might have used some x86 motherboards, but now ARM-based cash registers have also appeared.

There are also many self-service checkout machines in stores like Hema and RT-Mart. Can you guess what chips they use and whether there are corresponding development boards?

Automatic ticket vending machines in subways, self-service registration machines in hospitals, and ATMs in banks also have a mainboard, which is highly likely to be a chip from a development board, or it may even just contain an ARM development board. Moreover, outdoor electronic screens typically also have a development board behind them.

Moving into the industrial field, those related to electrical should know about PLCs, and there are also development boards available for this. Arduino has released a PLC development board, and for the operation interface, the screen is either using an x86 industrial control board or an ARM industrial control board, and these products also have corresponding development boards available.

It can be said that any field requiring program control needs chips, and where there are chips, there should be corresponding development boards. However, why do development board chips seem to be fewer now? I believe one reason is that some chips are not publicly available and are considered trade secrets, thus not available for external sale. Additionally, while you can acquire various resources for these chips, there may be obstacles preventing you from obtaining them, and you may need money and capabilities to access them.

In summary, the prospects for development boards are still very bright. For instance, set-top boxes, which are easily replaceable, can be realized directly using development boards with enclosures, indicating that development boards are continuously being productized and made user-friendly. In fact, many products are simply development boards combined with some components; for something like a set-top box, the development board might just need an outer shell and a remote control. What the manufacturers do is streamline, create enclosures, control software costs, manage marketing, and so on.

In fact, MCU chip development boards have already seen modular products emerging, and in the future, we might see even more modular items.

Welcome to visit our development board selection website, although it is not yet very complete, we have already recorded about 500 development boards. If you are interested or have any needs, you can check out our selection website. If you have any good suggestions, you can mention them in the group or leave us a message.

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