What do we do if the Arduino is not enough for our robotic applications? No worries; there are advanced ARM-based controller boards available, for example, STM32 microcontroller-based development boards such as NUCLEO and Texas Instrument (TI) microcontroller-based boards such as Launchpads. The STM32 is a family of 32-bit microcontrollers from a company called STMicroelectronics (http://www.st.com/content/st_com/en.html).

They manufacture microcontrollers based on different ARM architectures, such as the Cortex-M series. The STM32 controllers offer a lot more clock speed than Arduino boards. The range of STM32 controllers are from 24 MHz to 216 MHz, and the flash memory sizes are from 16 KB to 2 MB. In short, STM32 controllers offer a stunning configuration with a wider range of features than the Arduino. Most boards work at 3.3V and have a wide range of functionalities on the GPIO pins. You may be thinking about the cost now, right? But the cost is also not high: the price range is from $2 to $20. There are evaluation boards available in the market to test these controllers. Some famous families of evaluation boards are as follows:

• STM32 nucleo boards: The nucleo boards are ideal for prototyping. They are compatible with Arduino connectors and can be programmed using an Arduino-like environment called Mbed (https://www.mbed.com/en/).
• STM32 discovery kits: These boards are very cheap and come built-in with components such as an accelerometer, microphone, and LCD. The Mbed environment is not supported on these boards, but we can program the board using IAR, Keil, and Code Composer Studio (CCS).
• Full evaluation boards: These kinds of boards are comparatively expensive and are used to evaluate all the features of the controller.

• Arduino-compatible boards: These are Arduino header-compatible boards that have STM32 controllers. Examples of these boards include Maple, OLIMEXINO- STM32, and Netduino. Some of these boards can be programmed using the Wiring language, which is used to program Arduino. One of the most commonly used STM32 boards that resembles the Arduino mini's look is the STM32F103C8/T6, shown here:

The next board we will be covering is ESP8266.