As embedded systems continue to evolve, development boards are becoming increasingly specialized. They provide engineers and makers with purpose-built platforms for everything from edge AI and automotive electronics to FPGA design and next-gen wireless connectivity. In this roundup, we look at five recently released development boards that offer unique capabilities for prototyping innovative new projects.

Synaptics Coral Dev Board

Synaptics’ Coral Dev Board, which incorporates Astra’s SL2610 product line that features a 1-TOPS Torq NPU (derived from Google’s Coral NPU), is designed for AI applications such as wearables, automation hubs, industrial control systems, robotics, and more. The board’s SL2610 SoC packs a pair of Cortex-A55 cores, a single Cortex-M52 core, 2 GB of DDR4 RAM and up to 64 GB of flash storage. The development board also integrates a MIPI camera and display interfaces, microSD card slot, USB ports, mikroBUS and Qwiic connectors, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity options.

AAEON UP Squared Pro TWL AI Dev Kit

AAEON’s UP Squared Pro TWL AI Dev Kit combines the company’s Palm+ size development board with an integrated AI accelerator that provides up to 25 TOPS of AI inferencing power. The Up Squared Pro TWL can be combined with several add-on modules to boost that AI inferencing power up to 214 TOPS via the Axelera Metis AI acceleration module that boosts performance for edge AI applications. The board itself has an Intel N150 processor, Intel UHD Graphics, 8 GB of memory, and up to 64GB of eMMC Flash for storage.

Mercedes-Benz ARDEP V2

Mercedes-Benz is set to release its ARDEP V2 development board designed in tandem with Frickly Systems. The Automotive Rapid Development Platform (ARDEP) is an open-source board designed specifically for automotive development platforms and comes equipped with a STMicroelectronics STM32G474VE Arm Cortex-M4F microcontroller tasked for motor control. It also incorporates CORDIC and FMAC hardware math accelerators, and features CAN-FD and LIN transceivers. In addition, a PowerIO Shield provides 6x outputs and 6x inputs that support up to 48 V and 3 A per channel.

BrisbaneSilicon ELM11-Feather FPGA Development Board

BrisbaneSilicon’s ELM11-Feather FPGA Development Board, based on Gowin’s GW1NR FPGA, comes in an Adafruit Feather form factor. The FPGA-based board allows users to program the application, driver, and hardware layers in Lua, C, and VHDL/SystemVerilog. The board is outfitted with GPIO headers, built-in debugger, a USB-C port for power and programming, and a 2-pin header for a LiPo battery.

M5Stack Stamp-C5 Development Board

The M5Stack Stamp-C5 development board is a tiny wireless IoT USB-C module that’s populated with Espressif’s ESP32-C5 RISC-V microcontroller and equipped with dual-band Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth LE, and 802.15.4 (Zigbee/Thread). While the module is small, it does feature up to 19 GPIO pins, with 11 of those on standard pitch headers and holes, and eight on an FPC extension connector.