Low cost microcontroller boards

15 years ago, it wasn't easy to find a microcontroller board that was at the same time low cost, and fulfilling your needs. Nowadays, that's almost the opposite: there are so many boards available, some of them being open source, that for every idea you get, you are quite sure to find at least two or three boards that can comply with your requirements!

In this article, I take note of various low cost microcontroller boards that I read or hear about. According to the above paragraph, this article is not exhaustive, and will never be.

Update - 05-Jun-2016: given the impressive number of available boards nowadays, I stop maintaining most of the lists below. I will go on maintaining the Lists section. The M2M/IoT section is moved to this article.

Lists

• a list of 81 open-spec SBCs - HackerBoards (formerly LinuxGizmos) - 02-Jun-2016
• a list of 64 open-spec SBCs - LinuxGizmos - 31-Dec-2015 
• a list of 10 sub-$100 SBCs - LinuxGizmos - 18-Dec-2015
• a list of 53 sub-$200 SBCs, able to run Linux - LinuxGizmos - 20-May-2015
• a list of 10 low-cost SBCs, published by EE Times (20-Aug-2013)
• a list of 10 tiny development boards, published by EE Times (29-Jul-2013)

M2M / IoT (moved)

• moved to this article

Open source boards (no more maintained)

• MC HCK: a US$5 board based on a Freescale MK20DX32VLF5 (ARM Cortex-M4 core)
• Arduino Due: based on the Atmel SAM3X8E (Cortex M3 CPU) - 39 € (Feb-2013) on the Arduino Store
• Arduino Leonardo: based on the Atmel ATmega32u4 - 18 € (Feb-2013) on the Arduino Store
• Netduino 3 Wi-Fi: around 68 € on Mouser 
• TinyDuino and TinyLily, from TinyCircuits
• SAKURA boards - for GR-SAKURA-FULL model, microcontroller is a Renesas RX63N - 96 MHz, mémoire Flash de 1 Mo, RAM 128 Ko, FPU - on Radiospares: 42 € (Feb-2015)
• Nanode
• Rascal
• XinoRF: an hybrid of the Arduino UNO R3 and a wireless transceiver - £30 (Mar-2014)
• OLinuXino MAXI: based on iMX233 (ARM926J) - 45 € (Feb-2013) on Olimex web site
• UDOO: a multi development platform (Android, Linux, Arduino and Google ADK) - based on Freescale i.MX6 - 99 € (Quad model, Mar-2014)
  
  
• chipKIT Uno32: based on PIC32 - US$ 27 (Feb-2013) on Digilent web site - Arduino compatible, can be programmed with MPLAB as well
• BeagleBone:
• based on TI Sitara AM335X (Cortex A8 CPU) - 91 € (Feb-2013 - in France)
• BeagleBone Black: TI AM335x 1GHz ARM® Cortex-A8 - 37 € (Apr-2013)
• BeagleBone Green: based on BeagleBone Black design (Aug-2015) 
• SolderCore: based on a Cortex-M3 CPU - US$80 (Feb-2013) - comes preloaded with a BASIC interpreter
• PandaBoard ES: based on an OMAP4 processor (dual-core Cortex A9) - 150 € (Feb-2013)
• RioTboard: based on Freescale i.MX 6Solo (ARM Cortex A9) - 58 € (Feb-2014)
• SAMA5D3 Xplained: Cortex-A5 - US$79 at Atmel Store (Mar-2014)
• TinyCircuits: tiny open source circuits
• TS-7670, from Technologic Systems: Freescale i.MX286 (ARM 926) - starting from US$ 168 (May-2014)
• VoCore: an IndieGogo project - a Linux computer with Wi-Fi - US$20 (May-2014)
• WeIO: a Wi-Fi SoC (Atheros (now Qualcomm) AR9331) + an LPC11xx (ARM Cortex-M0) - price not known yet (Jun-2014) 
• HummingBoard: ARM core based SoC, GPU, 3 models - starting at US$45 (Jul-2014)
• Cubieboard
• Banana Pi: AllWinner A20 SoC, 1GB DDR3 SDRAM, wired 10/100/Gigabit ethernet (RJ45 socket), SATA port - 35 € at Reichelt Elektronic (Dec-2014). Check Banana Pro model as well
• LinkIt ONE: ARM7 (Mediatek Aster) + Wi-Fi and GPS - US$ 109 at tronixlabs (Jan-2015) 
• Black Swift: tiny wireless computer, a Kickstarter project (29-Jan-2015) - starting from US$ 26
• 96boards: 32- and 64-bit ARM Open Platform Specifications. Boards to be sold by Arrow (May-2015)
• Orange Pi: H3 Quad-core Cortex-A7, Mali400MP2 GPU, 1GB DDR3 - starting from US$ 25 (Aug-2015) 
• snickerdoodle: dual-core ARM A9 + FPGA + Wi-Fi + Bluetooth - on CrowdSupply - US$ 55 (Oct-2015) 
• C.H.I.P.: a $9 computer - on Kickstarter (Nov-2015) [Thanks for the info, Pierre R.!] 

Low power boards (no more maintained)

• SiM3L1xx Low-Power 32-bit MCU Evaluation Kit BADGER-SiM3L1-EK: ARM microcontroller + LCD + supercapacitor - US$30 (Mar-2013)

Misc. (no more maintained)

• XMC 2Go: Infineon Cortex M0 microcontroller - 5 € (Sep-2014)
• 32F0308DISCOVERY: STM32 F0 series ARM® Cortex™ microcontroller - $8.90 (Oct-2013)
• STM32 Nucleo boards (Oct-2015)
• Wandboard: Freescale i.MX6 (Cortex-A9) - US$79 for the Solo model (May-2013)
• OM11049: LPCXpresso board for LPC1114 (NXP) - around 30 € (Feb-2013)
• mbed boards: rapid prototyping for ARM microcontrollers
• Freescale FRDM-KL05Z: Cortex M0+ microcontroller - 9 € (Mar-2013)
• Freescale FRDM-KL25Z: Cortex M0+ microcontroller - 13 € for basic bundle (Nov-2013)
• Freescale FRDM-KL46Z: Cortex M0+ microcontroller - 15 € (Aug-2013)
• TI LaunchPads, which includes an Arm Cortex-M4 - 19 € for Stellaris version (Mar-2013)
• Cypress PSoC 4 Pioneer Kit: a kit for playing with a mixed-signal SoC - 26 € (Apr-2013 - pre-order)
• Development Kits available on Newark/element14
• Embest: embedded systems specialist
• CoActionOS: hardware + software. Hardware still being developped? (Jun-2013)
• ODROID: small boards with ARM cores - starting from US$69 (Jul-2013)
• startKIT from XMOS: add a configurable multicore microcontroller to Raspberry Pi - US$14.99 (Oct-2013)
• Teensy 3.0: a (very) small development board based on a Freescale MK20DX128 (ARM Cortex-M4 core) - US$19 (Nov-2013)
• VIA VAB-600 Springboard Kit: 800 MHz Cortex-A9 SoC - US$99 (Nov-2013)
• Arietta G25: 400 MHz ARM9 - 19.99 € (Jun-2014)
• Intel Galileo Development board: Quark X1000 - 53,60 € (Feb-2014)
• ArchiTech Hachiko: Cortex A9 - will be available for less than 100 € (Mar-2014)
• Blend Micro: an Arduino AtHeart board, based on an ATmega32U4. Bluetooth LE included - 25,40 € (Jun-2014)
• MIPS Creator CI20: dual-core MIPS32 processor + PowerVR SGX540 GPU - US$65 (Mar-2015)
• Raspberry Pi Zero: 1 GHz ARM11 core, 512 MB RAM - US$5 (Nov-2015) 

FPGA (no more maintained)

• Lattice's ICEstick evaluation kit - an article in EDN Europe - 21 € (Aug-2013)

Price not known yet (no more maintained)

• Intel Edison development board - the size of an SD card  
• WaRPboard - based on Freescale components
• Pinoccio: Arduino + wireless connectivity (Mar-2014)
• MicroView: chip-sized Arduino with built-in OLED display (Mar-2014)

Commercial web sites (no more maintained)

• ModtroniX , specialized in modular microcontroller based hardware and software solutions - specially for the PIC microcontroller from Microchip

Blogs (no more maintained)

• some network-enabled boards, that can be used to connect various sensors to the internet, are listed on Lelylan blog