It was not too long ago that microcontrollers only handled digital I/O. Now, we are just celebrating the tenth anniversary of Arduino-compatible microcontrollers and a slew of other platforms such as Raspberry Pi that have A/D and D/A, memory, UART, USB, and I2C bus.
These open platforms have spun a huge industry that includes hundreds of add-ons called shield, which enhance the original capabilities of these microcontrollers. Combined with these microcontrollers and a fairly simple development environment, these boards have created capabilities for these products to be a test and possibly development platforms that may provide the functionality of the much more expensive DAQs. Obviously, simplicity and much lower monetary values of these platforms are exchanges made with precision, documentation, and inherent limitation of these devices.
An Arduino Uno Rev3, the most recent of Arduino products and compatible product families (known as shields...