This article appeared in Make: Vol. 91. Subscribe for more maker projects and articles! There are plenty of boards to choose for your next wearable electronics project, and ultimately the best one is whichever fits your project’s unique constraints. To help narrow it down, here are five of the strongest contenders, plus a few that are too good to leave out.
We featured the VIM4 before, and we’re excited to see Khadas again with the VIM1S. Its combination of compact size, yet full-size ports and built-in storage (saving you a bundle on specialty cables and accessories), plus great graphical performance and Oowow OS delivery service make it stand out in the single board computer (SBC) space.
The LattePanda Mu is DFRobot’s take on the compute modules offered by the likes of Raspberry Pi. Unlike the Arm-powered Pi CM4, however, it is based on the quad-core 3.4GHz Intel N100, with claimed performance of more than double the latest Pi 5, as well as 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 64GB of integrated eMMC 5.1 storage. An open-source carrier implementation turns it into a tiny PC motherboard, complete with PCIe slots, perfect for your next Windows or Linux-based project....
Another spin on the ESP32 + 1.28″ round touchscreen formula, this time from the incredibly innovative M5Stack. What makes this one stand out is the rotary dial that surrounds the screen, providing a unique and charming user input method, which combined with an RFID reader and integrated M5StampS3 makes it great for home automation projects where temperature or light levels require convenient adjustment, as well as user identification and authorization.
