In any type of development, an evaluation kit is a great item to have on your side in the early prototyping stage. These kits are essentially pre-packaged bundles of hardware components and software tools that are designed to help engineers, developers, and curious hobbyists evaluate and experiment with specific integrated circuits, microcontrollers, or other semiconductor devices and decide which ones are necessary for their more focused project. Think of them as the high-tech equivalent of a Swiss Army knife, but instead of a corkscrew and tiny scissors, you get an array of sensors, interfaces, and demo applications.
At the heart of an evaluation kit is usually a development board featuring the IC or microcontroller of interest. This board is equipped with all manner of connectors, ports, and LEDs, giving you freedom to set up your project in many different ways. Accompanying this hardware are software tools and libraries, often including sample code and development environments, designed to jumpstart your project and showcase the chip's capabilities.
The real charm of evaluation kits lies in their ability to save time and sanity. Rather than starting from scratch, developers can leverage these kits to quickly prototype and test their ideas, validating the performance and suitability of the hardware for their intended application. No matter what you're dreaming up to build next, an evaluation kit can turn your ambitious plans into tangible reality with minimal frustration.
We recently released an Evaluation Kit for our PNT enthusiasts - The RTK EVK. True to it's EVK name, it has it all! Perfect for prototyping when you need to figure out which features will work for your application or project, the EVK has WiFi / Bluetooth®, Ethernet and LTE cellular as its connection options. For RTK corrections, L-band reception is enabled on the EVK.
Starting out on a PNT project and unsure just what kind of specs you need on your hardware? That's what an EVK is for!
