These boards are quite interesting, also for Arduino users, as they are Arduino compatible shields that pack several sensors on one board. If you can’t find an Arduino shield, know that there is also a choice of Nucleo expansion boards available from ST (and their resellers). Indeed, Nucleo is a pretty broad platform. Together all the boards cover flash memory sizes from 16 KB up to 2 MB, RAM from 4 KB to 320 KB, and clock frequencies from 32 MHz to 216 MHz. The other half is used on the high-performance boards: Half of the STM32 F family is at the heart of the mainstream boards. Once again three subcategories can be distinguished: The ultra-low-power boards are based on the STM32 L family that target smart meters & watches and the like. The boards from one size family are all identical except for the processor making it easy to compare performance or to scale up or down if your application allows it: simply plug in a different processor board. With a huge amount of Arduino compatible shields available on the internet it should be easy to quickly cobble something together. The small (50x19 mm) Nucleo-32 boards are Arduino Nano compatible, the other two are Arduino Uno R3 compatible and also have ST Morpho extension connectors that break out all the MCU pins. These three groups are divided further into three more groups: ultra-low-power (green), mainstream (blue) and high-performance (magenta). The boards come in three versions: small (Nucleo-32), short (Nucleo-64) and long (Nucleo-144) where the numbers refer to the pin counts of the MCUs. The website supporting the Nucleo series currently lists 26 different boards, which is not bad at all. Designed for the STM32 processor family the boards are Arduino, ARM mbed and ST Morpho compatible, making it accessible to beginners, advanced makers and professional users. Their Nucleo line of low-cost rapid prototyping boards, a sort of evolution of the popular Discovery boards from a few years back, is a good example of how to target a large audience. STMicroelectronics has a reputation for both good microcontrollers and good development tools. However, making an MCU is one thing, selling it is quite another and so MCU manufacturers are designing all sorts of product evaluation boards intended to trick a maximum number of potential users into using their products. The result is an exponential growing number of MCUs and ditto manufacturers. One of the reasons is that putting an MCU together has become pretty easy: just license a core from a well-known UK MCU core designer (no, not IKEA), buy some peripheral IPs from other vendors, put it all on a chip and away you go. Competition is fierce among microcontroller manufacturers.
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