#1 – FRDM-K64F
The FRDM-K64F is a development board for the Kinetis K64. Freescale had the great idea to not only make the platform compatible with the ARM mbed platform, but also to provide a board that is compatible with Arduino shields.Since a few months, you can also install a Java ME embedded firmware on the FRDM-K64F, turning it into what is probably the cheapest Java development board on the market.
#2 – SeeedStudio Grove system
"It seems that perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away."The Grove platform from SeeedStudio does just that. Their simple yet very smart connectors have become the standard platform for connecting IoT sensors. There is a huge list of sensors and actuators using the Grove standard connector, and you can literally hook Grove devices to anything, from Arduino to Raspberry Pi to Beaglebones thanks to the many shields available on the market.
#3 – Raspberry Pi Model A+ and B+
The Raspberry Pi Foundation really is doing a great job at keeping its very popular platform up-to-date. Every year, we get great upgrades to the existing models.This year, the model A+ brings the Pi's price tag under $20, with a much smaller form factor, and 30% less power-consumption than its predecessor. The B+ is a model B on steroids: more USB ports, more GPIO headers, and again a power-consumption that dropped by 40%!
#4 – Texas Instruments CC3200 LaunchPad
A powerful Cortex-M4 micro-controller, a WiFi module, a very complete IP stack (DNS, mDNS, SSL-TLS with hardware crypto support, ...), and tons of examples: I really liked the CC3200 user-experience. The only downside is that I had to switch to Windows to use Code Composer Studio, but if you want to use Energia you can have a cross-platform IDE and a programming model very close to Arduino.#5 – Advanticsys XM1000
#6 – ESP8266
#7 – Espruino Pico
The first version of the Espruino was already an impressive piece of engineering, fitting a full Javascript interpreter in 256K of Flash, and 48K of RAM. The event-driven programming model is really nice, and makes power management completely transparent.
#8 – Spark Core
#9 – CryptoCape
With the Cryptocape, one can easily get hardware support for many cryptographic functions (Elliptic curves, AES, RSA, SHA-2, ...). The downside is that the complete datasheets of some of the modules included in the cape are only available under NDA