Quicker Proof of Concept and Prototyping
Commercial product development using low cost computing platforms like the Raspberry Pi, the Arduino and the Odroid is on the rise. Companies are realizing these platform’s potential as mass produced, low cost off the shelf computer platforms. This type of hardware can be used to build complex products that previously needed custom boards.
The Arduino is the most widespread of the low-cost platforms. By supporting the standard pinout, there is no need to develop custom I/O for a core development board as the Arduino platform I/O specification for the board is relatively generic.
It is estimated that over 10 million raspberry PI computer platforms have been sold. Pi provides access to smartphone class processors and operating systems at a very attractive cost point. In addition, many Linux distributions are available for the Pi as well as operating systems from multiple vendors. With an excellent touch screen and a wide variety of off the shelf peripherals it’s a hard to beat platform.
The Odroid platform from Hardkernel is another low cost Linux platform that supports multiple processors and peripherals.
One of the key aspects of choosing a computing platform for any development is the availability of development tools and environments. In addition to the standard suite of Linux tools, many higher level tools are being introduced for these platforms, including 5th generation tools from Matlab, Mathematica and National Instruments. Garrett Technologies, Inc. is seeing startup as well as large companies providing very sophisticated rapid prototypes based on these platforms.
