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

Single-board computers like Raspberry Pi, have enabled a wide variety of monitoring applications. Microcontroller development boards offer 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 to single-board computers. For this purpose, a market research and experiments are conducted. The results show that promising low-cost microcontrollers exist, which could be applied to reduce the cost per node or increase the number of nodes used simultaneously in one monitoring system.