What's after microcontrollers?
Currently, my ongoing projects are all using some kind of microcontroller, but they are all limited by compute power. For example, I'm currently making a handheld device that runs striped down chess engine, and you can play chess against a bot. That bot is limited by compute power of ESP32S3. That's currently one of the strongest microcontrollers if we look at pure compute power. But it's still not enough.
The next step after a microcontroller is SBC - Single Board Computer. One of the most popular currently is Raspberry Pi. I like underdogs. That's why I bought Orange Pi Zero 2W.
That's something similar to Raspberry Pi zero, but it uses different processor. The good thing about Orange Pi is its manuals. The manual for my board contains 370 pages. And it's not a datasheet. It's actually written like a normal book.
The manuals can be found under Downloads section on Orangepi.org:
Along with manual there is a full schematic of a whole board:
Almost a whole manual is written in a form of questions:
Why have I written this? It's sort of a vision of what I'm trying to do. The goal is to scale up in complexity and compute power in devices. Microcontrollers have their role in today's world. But for my goal they are stepping stone, and a good stepping stone. They are complex but not as complex as a full on computer modules. And in order to make let's say a powerful device that can simulate chess gameplay, then computers are needed.
