The following are some of the important specifications of this board that may be useful while selecting an Arduino board for your robot:
- Speed: Almost all Arduino boards work under 100 MHz. Most of the controllers on boards are 8 MHz and 16 MHz. If you want to do some serious processing such as implementing a PID on a single chip, then the Arduino may not be the best choice, especially if we want to run it at a higher rate. The Arduino is best suited for simple robot control. It is best for tasks such as controlling a motor driver and servo, reading from analog sensors, and interfacing serial devices using protocols such as Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (UART), Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C), and Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI).
- GPIO pins: Arduino boards provide different kinds of I/O pins to developers, such as general purpose input/output (GPIO), analog-to-digital converter (ADC), and pulse width modulation (PWM), I2C, UART, and SPI pins. We can choose Arduino boards according to our pin requirements. There are boards having a pin count from 9 to 54. The more pins the board has, the larger will be the size of the board.
- Working voltage levels: There are Arduino boards working on TTL (5V) and CMOS (3.3V) voltage levels. For example, if the robot sensors are working only in 3.3V mode and our board is 5V, then we have to either convert 3.3V to the 5V equivalent using a level shifter or use an Arduino working at 3.3V. Most Arduino boards can be powered from USB itself.
- Flash memory: Flash memory is an important aspect when selecting an Arduino board. The output hex file generated by the Arduino IDE may not be optimized when compared with the hex of embedded C and assembly code. If your code is too big, it is better to go for higher flash memory, such as 256 KB. Most basic Arduino boards have only 32 KB of flash memory, so you should be aware of this issue before selecting the board.
- Cost: One of the final criteria is of course the cost of the board. If your requirement is just for a prototype, you can be flexible; you can take any board. But if you are making a product using this, cost will be a constraint.