Some microcontroller and processor board notes - ImmersiveSystems/net-robo GitHub Wiki
From Make Magazine, volume 36:
Arduino Yun looks really interesting because it has an Arduino Leonardo onboard with the Atmel uC for handling robot navigation commands etc, as well as a 400MHz ARM/Linux SoC processor running the Linux Router distribution OpenWRT. This means WiFi(n) is dead simple & they even say out of the box can be reprogrammed over WiFi (awesome!). They talk about hooking a camera up and live streaming over the network also. They provide a library called bridge out of the box that supports communication between the linux side and the arduino side. They say 90% of the arduino shields out there (all those compatible with a Leonardo) will plug in, so a motor controller shield would for example, as well as potentially a camera shield. They even mentioned something about the ease of getting it up on the network. It’s only $69.
http://hackaday.com/2013/09/12/the-arduino-yun-yun-means-cloud/
“The Arduino Yun’s bridge library allows communication between the two processors (AR9331 - the Linux system and the ATmega32U4 – the micro processor).
It’s possible to install and run your own applications using the bridge. The ATmega32U4 can be programmed from the AR9331 by uploading a sketch through the Arduino Yun’s Wi-Fi interface. When connected to the same Wi-Fi network, the board will appear under the ‘port’ menu of the arduino IDE. the sketch will be transferred to the AR9331, and the linux distribution will program the ATmega32U4 through the SPI bus, emulating an AVR ISP programmer.”
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2013/05/20/arduino-yun-robot/1
“The computational power of the Yún is certainly nothing near that of the Pi or its rival ARM-based single-board computers: OpenWRT was originally designed as a replacement OS for selected broadband routers and gateways, and the AR9331 chip can't match the Pi's Broadcom BCM2835 for performance. For hardware hackers, however, the benefits of low-level access to a microcontroller combined with the flexibility of a Wi-Fi connected Linux microcomputer should prove a powerful draw when the device launches next month for $69.”
Arduino also released a new Robot Kit, however it does not use the Yun with it’s Linux SoC processor, so is not suitable for streaming video over the network as is. Very interesting and complete kit otherwise though.
http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Robot
Then there’s the AMD Gizmo board, an x86 board, larger, more powerful by far than the other ARM SoC boards, and energy hungry in comparison, but no problem doing video streaming, even real time processing, etc. Has GPIO’s for PWM etc like a uC board, so is an option, but more expensive at $200 and chews through battery power quicker. It’s an smaller and less known community, and I’d only try it if one of the other options doesn’t work well enough.
http://www.gizmosphere.org/why-gizmo/gizmoboard/
Then there’s smaller community kickstarter started projects like the Udoo which just came out. It’s an ARM/Linux + Arduino DUE/Atmel combination SBC that also can run Android, for between $100-$135 depending on options. The high end one is a quad core processor. With all the bundled parts it adds up to $134-$156. Has a 1GHz onboard Ethernet NIC and sounds like it has onboard wifi. They have a 5Mpx with autofocus camera accessory kit for $39.
http://www.udoo.org/ It’s brand new developed by a small team so it may have problems that take time to resolve.
Microchip has released a companion board for RaspberryPi so you can write and compile programs on the Pi and shoot them to the Microchip microcontroller, See Raspberry Pi chipKIT Pi Expansion Board With 32-bit MCU Unveiled (video) The board can be purchased here.