ABOUT
Built by a sound art educator
Hi, I'm Brett. I teach sound art at a university and build kinetic sound sculptures out of Arduinos, servos and stepper motors. Every semester I hit the same problem: the board in the syllabus is sold out, a price changed, or a shop stopped carrying it.
BoardWatch is the tool I wanted. It's one page that tells you which audio-capable dev boards you can buy today, where, and for how much, plus honest specs and a quick picker to help students (and you) choose.
How we check
- A small script reads each shop's public, structured product data (Shopify product JSON, WooCommerce Store API, schema.org JSON-LD, Reverb's public API) and only falls back to the visible page when there's nothing else.
- It obeys robots.txt, waits at least 3 seconds between requests to the same shop, and identifies itself with a clear user-agent.
- If a shop blocks automated checks, we don't work around it. We mark it "not checked". Right now that's: DigiKey, Mouser, Sweetwater.
- Specs come only from official maker pages, and each one links to its source. If we couldn't confirm a spec, we leave it blank.
- Currently tracking: Electro-Smith (official), Reverb (used market), SparkFun (Teensy manufacturer), PJRC (Teensy designer), Bela Shop (official), Thonk, Adafruit, Pimoroni, HiFiBerry (official).
Sponsor BoardWatch
BoardWatch is free and doesn't track you. One sponsor slot sits on the home and board pages, and it's a good fit for audio hardware makers, PCB fabs, synth DIY shops and courses. Sponsorship never changes stock data or ordering.
Affiliate links
Some vendor links may become affiliate links, which means BoardWatch earns a small commission at no extra cost to you. They're never used to rank boards.