It's been another tumultuous year in the world of in-vehicle electronics. Supply chain issues have barely relented as new chips jostle for position as the manufacturer's benchmark. Meanwhile, many exciting new boards, software, and other technologies keep us innovating. Let's take a look at the maker landscape and see who stood up when the tokens fell!
PUT NO IN ARDUINO?
Arduino Week in March was a brilliant virtual event, showcasing some amazing new products, but frustrated makers weren't able to get their hands on many of the featured items because supply issues prevented them from being manufactured.
But even when there is no hardware to hack, software development can continue, leading to the release of the new Arduino IDE 2.0 in September. The complete rewrite abandons the Java-based processing origins of 1.x for the Eclipse Theia framework, familiar from Microsoft's hugely popular and extensible Visual Studio Code IDE. To learn more, check out our blog and turn to page 47 of this section for an exclusive look at Arduino's new Make Your Uno kit!
PI NOT ALWAYS EASY
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is enjoying great success in the microcontroller market, as its Pico and Pico W (wireless) microcontroller development boards find their way into a plethora of projects, not to mention the RP2040 chip that powers them. Meanwhile, the trend of porting Python projects to microcontrollers using Adafruit's CircuitPython platform (instead of relying on the grunt of single-board computers) continues to prove popular, that benefits the entire RP2040 ecosystem.
But all is not so sweet in the Pi world, with SBCs virtually untraceable for as long as we can remember. If you check rpilocator.com every day, you might be lucky enough to get your hands on a CM4 compute module, which you can pair with a motherboard like Timonsku's Piunora, but the trusty Pi 4 isn't. often available only in secondary markets, usually for many times the list price.
NO NEW NORMAL
Some experts predict that things will get back to "normal" or at least stabilize by 2023. In the meantime, we're reveling in the new solutions and workarounds we're seeing in the community, and we hope this special section , and our annual Make: Guide to Boards, help make your creation a little easier this year!
The article above is the opening statement of our "Boards Guide 2022". Our annual look at the major news, advances and achievements in the world of development boards. Below, you'll find an overview of what was included in this issue. Be sure to subscribe to get the whole story!
• WHEN FLEAS ARE RARE page 36 – now also online!
Scarcity continues to pinch makers and crafters. We interviewed a range of stakeholders across the supply chain spectrum, from distributors to large card manufacturers to individual professional manufacturers, to ask how they are affected and when – or if – supplies components will return to normal.
• RISC-V REVOLUTION page 42 – now also online!
If you can't get the tokens you want, why not make some yourself? Open silicon is evolving at an incredible rate, with the RISC-V chip architecture moving from experimental FPGAs to consumer boards like Espressif's ESP32-C3. PINE64 uses RISC-V microcontrollers in its Pinecils and runs on a 64-bit RISC-V single board computer. D1 64-bit single-core RISC-V chip.
It's been another tumultuous year in the world of in-vehicle electronics. Supply chain issues have barely relented as new chips jostle for position as the manufacturer's benchmark. Meanwhile, many exciting new boards, software, and other technologies keep us innovating. Let's take a look at the maker landscape and see who stood up when the tokens fell!
PUT NO IN ARDUINO?
Arduino Week in March was a brilliant virtual event, showcasing some amazing new products, but frustrated makers weren't able to get their hands on many of the featured items because supply issues prevented them from being manufactured.
But even when there is no hardware to hack, software development can continue, leading to the release of the new Arduino IDE 2.0 in September. The complete rewrite abandons the Java-based processing origins of 1.x for the Eclipse Theia framework, familiar from Microsoft's hugely popular and extensible Visual Studio Code IDE. To learn more, check out our blog and turn to page 47 of this section for an exclusive look at Arduino's new Make Your Uno kit!
PI NOT ALWAYS EASY
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is enjoying great success in the microcontroller market, as its Pico and Pico W (wireless) microcontroller development boards find their way into a plethora of projects, not to mention the RP2040 chip that powers them. Meanwhile, the trend of porting Python projects to microcontrollers using Adafruit's CircuitPython platform (instead of relying on the grunt of single-board computers) continues to prove popular, that benefits the entire RP2040 ecosystem.
But all is not so sweet in the Pi world, with SBCs virtually untraceable for as long as we can remember. If you check rpilocator.com every day, you might be lucky enough to get your hands on a CM4 compute module, which you can pair with a motherboard like Timonsku's Piunora, but the trusty Pi 4 isn't. often available only in secondary markets, usually for many times the list price.
NO NEW NORMAL
Some experts predict that things will get back to "normal" or at least stabilize by 2023. In the meantime, we're reveling in the new solutions and workarounds we're seeing in the community, and we hope this special section , and our annual Make: Guide to Boards, help make your creation a little easier this year!
The article above is the opening statement of our "Boards Guide 2022". Our annual look at the major news, advances and achievements in the world of development boards. Below, you'll find an overview of what was included in this issue. Be sure to subscribe to get the whole story!
• WHEN FLEAS ARE RARE page 36 – now also online!
Scarcity continues to pinch makers and crafters. We interviewed a range of stakeholders across the supply chain spectrum, from distributors to large card manufacturers to individual professional manufacturers, to ask how they are affected and when – or if – supplies components will return to normal.
• RISC-V REVOLUTION page 42 – now also online!
If you can't get the tokens you want, why not make some yourself? Open silicon is evolving at an incredible rate, with the RISC-V chip architecture moving from experimental FPGAs to consumer boards like Espressif's ESP32-C3. PINE64 uses RISC-V microcontrollers in its Pinecils and runs on a 64-bit RISC-V single board computer. D1 64-bit single-core RISC-V chip.
