Top 3 Arduino boards for home automation
With all of this started, i won one of their competitions with a simple project and i got sent arduino kids to play with back in then the arduino was associated mostly with electronics projects, but many of things has changed since and now arduino has a wide array Of different boards that can be used for different purposes, including connected boards and today, im going to select 3 best arduino boards for your home automation projects. So why pick arduino boards? Some of you probably noticed that arduino boards are slightly more expensive and im, not here to bully your consumer choices. However, if you add arduino to your basket a couple of things that will happen just like other maker oriented brands, arduino supports community, provides you with hardware, software and library support for your project. On top of that, they host a lot of different competitions, interesting projects and well, they nurture the community and it works, judging by the numbers of people interested in arduino and while registering on the forums its, not something that you can say about. Many other manufacturers that only focus on delivering the hardware and pretty much and their support there. So next time, when you pick arduino board for yourself, you feel great for supporting that initiative and bringing makers together if youre, using arduino boards or esp boards in your products. You probably used arduino ide, which basically a part of the package as well, but we might not be aware that arduino ide 2.
0 is already available as a beta, so i would strongly recommend you to give it a go. Especially, it brings to a refreshed interface with some better support for libraries and board manager. It brings debugging to the mix while keeping it simplistic, so it doesnt scare off people that are just getting started, but im getting sidetracked were here to talk about best arduino boards. For home automation – and i have a quiz for you – are you able to identify arduino boards lets get started. So this is the first board in the heart. We have some nd21 and you probably recognize that form factor. Yes, it is the arduino board and yeah. You probably figure out by now that this is a nano but its not and simple. No, no because of this, this is wi fi, 2.5 gigahertz, and it sits on top of that arduino nano. So any clues. What kind of board it is im not going to keep you all guessing any longer? This is arduino nano 33 iot and here comes the grand opening. I mean there isnt much of a opening really because its minuscule and it sits inside of the box at the back of the box, youll see everything that the board has to offer, which is very handy, and you would be surprised how much different gpios and interfaces Are available on the board like this, as i mentioned, it comes with some d21 cortex, m0 plus 32 bit low power arm microcontroller i mean this thing is tiny about five centimeters.
In total, now the radio module its a nina w102, which is using 2.4 gigahertz band for connectivity, lets, get that plugged in and see those led blink in terms of what you can play with. There are eight analog inputs, theres one analog output, which is a 10 bit 11 pwm pins, which you can use to drive your stepper motors and servos and 14 different pins that you can allocate to whatever you like, as the name suggests, arduino nano 33 iot version Is the take on the original arduino nano and whats really awesome about this board? That is retaining the same form factor while bringing wi fi on board and the gpl mappings, which means upgrading your project to a connected one. It could be as simple as swapping the boards and writing a library to handle wi fi, but if 2.4 gigahertz wi fi isnt enough, then the board has support for bluetooth, 4.2 and ble that an integrated accelerometer means that you could have fun in any kinetic projects Of your making arduino nano 33 iot is one of the smallest arduino boards, which makes it perfect for home. Automation means your project is gon na, be tiny and youll still be able to do powerful things like reading sensory data, displaying it on the screen and sending the data over the internet at the same time, thats awesome, but the fun and support doesnt stop there arduino. Just introduced the arduino cloud and if you dont like their offering, you can easily switch to either offerings from google, amazon or microsoft as arduino provides you with supporting libraries and getting started guides how to use those thats really cool.
If you just want to learn something new, i would strongly recommend you to take a look at getting started guide at arduino page and take extra care because, unlike other arduino boards and all of the boards im going to list in this video, it has 3.3 volt Logic, this means, if you connect 5 volts inputs, you may end up damaging your board. So do it only with logic, shifters, the board number 2 and the second quiz can you guess the name and the new board comes with completely different form factor and yes, smartypants. This is an arduino board, so well done there, but which kind of, if you take a closer look, youll notice that the reserve very familiar microcontroller responsible for wi fi and just like with nano in the heart of the pcb. We have a some md, 21 microcontroller. So you probably want to pay attention to pens, because they will tell you the form factor of the board and the series, because this one has a lot of different pins to work with and the last hint its a lipo connector with a lipo charger. Its a makerboard one, zero one zero. You could think of this board as of nano with a bigger form factor inside youll find the same familiar microcontroller and wi fi module. Now the number of pins differs slightly and obviously the dimensions are quite bigger, as well. Arduino maker wifi edition 1010, its the staple of arduino boards for a couple of reasons.
First, it brings the familiar sun, the 21 microcontroller and wi fi together now, with a bigger form factor. It also offering a shield support, which means youll be able to pick from different shields, adding extra hardware without any issues to your next projects. You dont have to design those yourself. All work has been done for you now theres a couple of things that sets this board. Apart from the nano edition, it includes a lipo connector and a lipo charger, so you can easily transform the project into a portable one or battery operated one, and to take the advantage of that portability. There is a real time clock which will extend the life of your device, its pretty awesome as far as the automation is concerned, just like the nano iot edition it comes with library supports for cloud, so you can again take advantage of arduino clouds or competitors from Amazon, google or microsoft, but if the cloud isnt your thing, then libraries existing for mqtt or rest well, they will let you do stuff your way. Now that you know the maker form factor, lets switch to quiz number three and i dont know what youre gon na say: youre gon na go all clever on me and youre gon na straight away, say that this is arduino maker board and youre gon na be Right but as you can see, we do have the same sam d21 microcontroller in the center of the board, followed by a connector this time for batteries instead of lipo.
But there is a new thing on the pcb as well. Can you guess what that is? Well, this one is laura and in case you dont know, laura stands for long range. This is arduino maker 1. Thirteen hundred on both maker boards – you can expect similar pin outs, so in this case youll get eight general purpose pins for your use cases. Now additional 12 pins that you can use as a pwm signal as a one analog output and seven analog inputs, and also ten external interrupts, arduino maker, one, thirteen hundred its the lora enable board, and in case you lived in a cave for last couple of years And missed it. Lara stands for long range, and i mean long like this, because the longest range or distance they were able to use these boards from arduino was over 436 miles. I mean thats the distance from poland when the tests were taking place to netherlands thats a lot. I mean youre, probably not going to end up using that board over such a great distance, or maybe you will i dont know, but if you want to take your project out there somewhere and get the data transfer back to your castle home hub or whatever you Want to name it laura is probably the protocol you want to use now with the familiar and make a form factor means that youll get support for shields. So adding extra and hardware to your board is very easy.
Just snap the shield on load the existing libraries and youre ready to go unlike the previous maker board, this one is equipped with a connector for batteries, so you can use triple or double a batteries to power your board and well really make it portable. So if your home automation, project, extends to a farm, or you want to communicate with something that is really far, laura is a great choice of devices to pick from, and arduino itself has many lora compatible boards to build your ecosystem as well. Those three boards are best suited for home automation, in my opinion, but thats just a tip of the arduino iceberg. Right now there is a summer sale. So in the description of this video youre gon na find the links to those boards and the sale itself and youll be able to save some money on purchasing as well. There are two more boards. I would like to give an honorable mention. First arduino nano rp 2040, which is familiar because its a nano that uses rp2040 microcontroller developed by raspberry pi and brings that, together with wifi connectivity, seriously interesting board. If you want to start something new another one is arduino port enter h7, which aims at industrial applications. So if you want something more robust, something more industrial, you probably want to check out their pro series and see whats the offering i like. I would like to thank arduino for partnering up with me, so i could bring the best arduino choices to your home automation projects if youre interested well check the links in the description and leave me a comment saying: what is your favorite arduino board and how are You using it in your home automation, setup already as for now, i probably have to allocate some time my staircase project, which uses arduino nano, could use one of those iot upgrades and that might be featured on my channel soon.
Another board could be excellent fit for my overly engineered toolbox. Hmm, i really need to allocate some time for that and im in the middle of building a new floor which gon na contains in floor lights. Yes, lights, not hitting, so if youre interested in that, then i have a news for you because i dont have any schedule. So you know how youtube works. Im not going to teach you that if you dont want to miss the next video, but what i would like you to know is that i have a bunch of social media through which you can connect with me. Share your ideas and comment comment on snippets of my projects.