SERIAL PLOTTER ARDUINO IDE ALTERNATIVE UPDATE

To understand the Seeeduino XIAO you really need to understand the microcontroller chip that powers it, the SAMD21. The only connector on the board is a USB-C jack. The boards are packaged with some male header pins which you can solder in if you wish to use them, or you can just wire to the pins directly. The XIAO is available individually or in 3-packs, and it’s a quality build. In performance, this thing is light years ahead of the ATtiny85. In fact, it’s probably about the smallest Arduino-compatible board you’ve ever seen, with the exception perhaps of a few ATtiny85-based offerings. The Seeeduino XIAO is the latest entry (as of this writing) to this group of boards, and it’s also the smallest. Many of them include “Grove” connectors, an interface standard used by Seeedstudio and some other manufacturers to simplify interfacing microcontrollers with external sensors and displays. The Seeeduino line of microcontrollers from Seeedstudio are Arduino-compatible boards, kits, and peripherals. Incidentally, if you are wondering about the origins of the word XIAO, it is a type of Chinese flute that has been around for centuries.

SERIAL PLOTTER ARDUINO IDE ALTERNATIVE UPDATE

Called the Seeeduino XIAO (pronounced “sh-ow”) it is a 32-bit Arduino-compatible module that can be used to update and improve your Arduino designs. The board we are looking at today is a very tiny and very inexpensive offering from Seeedstudio.

And there are other selections as well, Arduino themselves have a range of more powerful microcontroller boards based upon 32-bit processors instead of the old 8-bit designs like the Uno. We have already done that with the ESP32 boards, they are much more powerful than the ATMEGA328-based Arduino boards and have a wealth of additional features.

So for more advanced projects or better-performing versions of existing designs, we can look at some other, more modern microcontroller boards. And it has limitations (such as speed or analog input resolution) that make it a poor choice for some designs. But for all of its advantages, the Arduino Uno is a pretty old piece of technology, dating back to around 2005.

Serial plotter arduino ide alternative