Now that we've covered the important considerations for MCU selection and the general types of development hardware, let's see how the development board that will be used in this book was selected. STM is the only manufacturer that we are evaluating in order to limit the examples to something easily digestible. In an actual product engineering effort, it behooves the designer to take a fresh look at all possible vendors. While everybody has their own preferred way of accomplishing cross-vendor searches, an easy way is to use distributor websites.

Thanks to well-curated prototyping-oriented distributor websites (such as Digikey and Mouser), an engineer is able to perform parametric searches and comparisons across many different vendors. One downside to this approach is the searches are limited to whatever product lines that specific...