How to Pick the Right Electronics Board for Your DIY Project

Some of the best DIY projects use microcontrollers or cheap single board computers to automate awesome stuff. But Between the Arduino, the Raspberry Pi, and the BeagleBone, it's hard to figure out which is best for a project. Let's demystify the most popular boards and make the selection process a bit easier.

Words like microcontroller, pocket-sized computer, or development boards might conjure up images of a geek with a soldering iron attached to their hip, but these boards are accessible and useful to everyone. Each of these boards are incredibly easy to work with, and each are good as a starting point for electronics hobbies as well as advanced features for your own projects.

However, when it comes to cheap, open-source hardware, you have a ton of options to build your projects on. We're going to outline the differences between the three most popular boards: the Arduino Uno, Raspberry Pi Model B, and BeagleBone Black. Each of these have their own strengths and weakness, and certain platforms are better for certain types of projects more than others.

If all you want is the specs, here's a breakdown of the differences between each of them. There's much more to it then that, so we'll discuss what you can do with each in the following sections. 

source : http://lifehacker.com/how-to-pick-the-right-electronics-board-for-your-diy-pr-742869540