10 best IOT Hardware platforms

IOT is growing rapidly and we are not far from days where our machines can interact with each other and act accordingly. In fact we will be left behind if we don’t adapt or learn this amazing technology. Here is a list of 10 best IOT hardware platforms which will help us to learn and prototype IOT devices and stuffs.

This list was compiled after seeking experts opinions, conducting polls, forum discussions and much more. Therefore it reflects the choice of many Embedded Programmers and designers. I believe this list will help to choose the perfect platform for  you.

Arduino Yun is a hybrid board which has inbuilt Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity features. This board is powered by ATmega32u4 which handles USB communication whereas the powerful Atheros AR9331 which handles the Wifi and Ethernet interfaces and comes with a Linux distribution based on OpenWrt. There is no need to add external shileds and interfaces for providing internet connectivity. Also you will get tons of technical support from its huge community. This makes Arduino Yun a great platform for developing IOT projects.

Raspberry Pi is a credit card sized computing platform which runs on linux platform. This board features USB ports for keyboard and mouse, a HDMI port for display and an Ethernet port for wired internet connectivity. However for wireless connectivity we need to go for Wifi adapters which we can get it from the market without any trouble. The vast community makes it perfect to develop IOT projects since we get plenty of hands when we stumble.

ESP8266 is a Wi-Fi module that is capable of providing internet connectivity to any microcontroller through UART communication. Also it comes with an integrated TCP/IP protocol stack. Each of these module comes pre programmed with AT commands making it easy to plug and play for IOT projects. This module also can also be used for specific application devices and sensors by using its GPIO pins.

Beaglebone Black is a pretty famous low-cost development platform built around ARM Cortex A8 processor. It runs on Linux environment just like the Raspberry Pi. This board has in-built Ethernet Connectivity feature along with HDMI port to connect a monitor to work on. The robust community of Beaglebone makes it outstanding and viable solution to learn and built IOT projects.

Particle.io (formerly known as Spark Core) Photon and Electron is a Wi-Fi enabled IOT hardware platform.