Evaluation of low-cost microcontroller-based systems for simple sensor applications

Single-board computers, such as Raspberry Pi, have enabled a wide variety of monitoring applications. Microcontroller development boards offer a similar functionality but at a lower cost. Still, they are not widely used, because they are supposed to be slow. This paper aims to evaluate the abilities of modern microcontrollers and compares them with those of single-board computers. For this purpose, experiments concerning power consumption and performance evaluation are conducted. The results suggest that promising low-cost microcontrollers exist, which could be applied to reduce cost and energy consumption per node or increase the number of nodes used simultaneously in one monitoring system.