As pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, mid-range MCUs are currently capable of providing the resources to satisfy most, if not all of our design requirements. So one of the tough questions is what we'll be spending our money on: hardware components or software development? Imponderabilities aside, we'll now take a closer look at three candidate solutions:
- A single mid-range AVR MCU board (ATmega2560)
- A higher-end Cortex-M3 MCU board (SAM3X8E)
- A tandem of mid-range MCU board and an SBC with OS
We're pretty close to meeting hte design requirements with just an Arduino Mega (ATmega2560), as the first five sections require little in terms of CPU speed, just a number of digital input and output pins and ...
