Bench Talk

Development kits (dev kits) save time because they are a ready-made circuit/platform. The purpose of a dev kit is so you can run experiments on it. It’s much cheaper to burn up a dev kit than an original design. A dev kit usually comes as a box with manuals, one or more PCBs, and maybe some cables, a power supply, and software or links to software, and they are perfect for getting a next look past the data sheet. There are dev kits for all kinds of parts from fiber optics to complete design-your-own car remote key fobs. Most processor/CPU/MCU-focused dev kits are complete in that they can be used right out of the box, and maybe you do a little programming to customize things.