AVR is a family of microcontrollers developed since 1996 by Atmel, acquired by Microchip Technology in 2016. These are modified Harvard architecture 8-bit RISC single-chip microcontrollers. AVR was one of the first microcontroller families to use on-chip flash memory for program storage, as opposed to one-time programmable ROM, EPROM, or EEPROM used by other microcontrollers at the time.
Atmel Corporation was a designer and manufacturer of semiconductors before being subsumed by Microchip Technology in 2016. Atmel was founded in 1984. The company focused on embedded systems built around microcontrollers. Its products included microcontrollers radio-frequency (RF) devices including Wi-Fi, EEPROM, and flash memory devices, symmetric and asymmetric security chips, touch sensors and controllers, and application-specific products. Atmel supplies its devices as standard products, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), or application-specific standard product (ASSPs) depending on the requirements of its customers.
Contiki is an operating system for networked, memory-constrained systems with a focus on low-power wireless Internet of Things devices. Extant uses for Contiki include systems for street lighting, sound monitoring for smart cities, radiation monitoring, and alarms. It is open-source software released under the BSD-3-Clause license.
The AVR Butterfly is a battery-powered single-board microcontroller developed by Atmel. It consists of an Atmel ATmega169PV Microcontroller, a liquid crystal display, joystick, speaker, serial port, real-time clock (RTC), internal flash memory, and sensors for temperature and voltage. The board is the size of a name tag and has a clothing pin on back so it can be worn as such after the user enters their name onto the LCD.
Atmel ARM-based processors are microcontrollers and microprocessors integrated circuits, by Microchip Technology, that are based on various 32-bit ARM processor cores, with in-house designed peripherals and tool support.
Arduino is an open-source hardware and software company, project, and user community that designs and manufactures single-board microcontrollers and microcontroller kits for building digital devices. Its hardware products are licensed under a CC BY-SA license, while software is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) or the GNU General Public License (GPL), permitting the manufacture of Arduino boards and software distribution by anyone. Arduino boards are available commercially from the official website or through authorized distributors.
ChibiOS/RT is a compact and fast real-time operating system supporting multiple architectures and released under a mix of the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL3) and the Apache License 2.0. It is developed by Giovanni Di Sirio.
The uIP is an open-source implementation of the TCP/IP network protocol stack intended for use with tiny 8- and 16-bit microcontrollers. It was initially developed by Adam Dunkels of the Networked Embedded Systems group at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, licensed under a BSD style license, and further developed by a wide group of developers.
A single-board microcontroller is a microcontroller built onto a single printed circuit board. This board provides all of the circuitry necessary for a useful control task: a microprocessor, I/O circuits, a clock generator, RAM, stored program memory and any necessary support ICs. The intention is that the board is immediately useful to an application developer, without requiring them to spend time and effort to develop controller hardware.
OBDuino is an open source trip computer design based on the Arduino platform. An OBDuino may be assembled and customised by an electronics hobbyist; it displays information such as instantaneous fuel economy, engine tuning parameters etc. on an LCD.
Faustino is a physical computing platform geared towards process monitoring and control. The faustino platform consists of a single-board microcontroller with embedded analog and digital I/O support, an input module with LCD, sensors and actuators in form of solid state relays. The development software is based on Eclipse and WinAVR, a variant of GCC for AVR microcontrollers. For visual presentation of measurements, a XML-configured Windows status monitor application is available.
FunkOS is a real-time operating system (RTOS) developed by Funkenstein Software Consulting, targeting a variety of microcontroller architectures. It is free to use in any project - commercial or otherwise - with few conditions. If the kernel is ported to a new target, that code must also be made available for inclusion in future releases. Also, if used in commercial projects, an attribution statement must be included in some form of product documentation.
CubeSat Space Protocol (CSP) is a small network-layer delivery protocol designed for CubeSats. The idea was developed by a group of students from Aalborg University in 2008, and further developed for the AAUSAT3 CubeSat mission that was launched in 2013. The protocol is based on a 32-bit header containing both network and transport layer information. Its implementation is designed for embedded systems such as the 8-bit AVR microprocessor and the 32-bit ARM and AVR from Atmel. The implementation is written in C and is ported to run on FreeRTOS and POSIX and pthreads-based operating systems such as Linux. The three-letter acronym CSP was adopted as an abbreviation for CAN Space Protocol because the first MAC-layer driver was written for CAN-bus. The physical layer has since been extended to include several other technologies, and the name was therefore extended to the more general CubeSat Space Protocol without changing the abbreviation.
Mbed is a platform and operating system for internet-connected devices based on 32-bit ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers. Such devices are also known as Internet of Things devices. The project is collaboratively developed by Arm and its technology partners.
NuttX is a real-time operating system (RTOS) with an emphasis on technical standards compliance and small size. Scalable from 8-bit to 64-bit microcontroller environments, the main governing standards in NuttX are from the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Further standard application programming interfaces (APIs) from Unix and other common RTOSes are adopted for functions unavailable under these standards, or inappropriate for deeply embedded environments, such as the fork system call.
Tinkerforge is an open source hardware platform of stackable microcontroller building blocks (Bricks) that can control different modules (Bricklets). The primary communication interface of the building blocks can be extended using Master Extensions. The hardware can be controlled by external programs written in C, C++, C#, Object Pascal, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Shell and VB.NET over a USB, Wifi or Ethernet connection, and running on Windows, Linux and macOS. This non-embedded programming approach eliminates the typical requirements and limitations of conventional embedded software development. Tinkerforge hardware and software are both Open Source, and all files are hosted on GitHub.
The Arduino Uno is an open-source microcontroller board based on the Microchip ATmega328P microcontroller and developed by Arduino.cc. The board is equipped with sets of digital and analog input/output (I/O) pins that may be interfaced to various expansion boards (shields) and other circuits. The board has 14 digital I/O pins, 6 analog I/O pins, and is programmable with the Arduino IDE, via a type B USB cable. It can be powered by the USB cable or by an external 9-volt battery, though it accepts voltages between 7 and 20 volts. It is similar to the Arduino Nano and Leonardo. The hardware reference design is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 license and is available on the Arduino website. Layout and production files for some versions of the hardware are also available.
