At the Open Hardware Summit/World Maker Faire in New York last weekend, the Arduino team presented several changes to the Arduino platform.
The most interesting announcements:
New Arduino Uno board, it will replace the Arduino Duemilenove. Besides a cool new design (done by ToDo studio) of the board and packaging, the board sports several changes and new features:
Different USB chip. The previous boards used an FTDI chip (FT232RL) for USB communications. The new Arduino Uno boards use an AtMega8u2. This means no more driver installs on Mac and for Windows users only a .inf (plain text) file is required for it to work.With this chip it is also possible to reprogramm the chip so that the Arduino boards presents itself to a computer as a different device (i.e. keyboard, mouse, joystick). Cool huh?Also the board is now FCC certified. Good news for US users. CE certification is also still in place. The pin output is compatible with the Duemilenove and also the AtMega328 is still powering the new Uno, so all your shields should still work fine.
Finally, the 3.3V power supply on board was regulated by the FTDI chip and would get you 50 mA if you were lucky. The new Arduino Uno sports a LP2985 power regulator delivering 3.3V and provide 150 mA.
Thanks to LusoRobotica, the new board can be seen in glorious 360 degree here.
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Arduino Mega 2560
A new Arduino Mega board was announced, called Arduino Mega 2560. Its most notable features:
- The new board is based on the AtMega 2560, contains 54 digital IO pins of which 14 are capable of PWM output
- 16 analog inputs
- 4x UART
- Runs at 16 Mhz and contains 256 kB, of which 8 kB is in use by the bootloader, the rest is available for your program.
- It also uses the AtMega8u2 chip for the USB communications, like the Arduino Uno.
- This board is also visible in 360 degrees
. - Also announced was a new Arduino board with onboard ethernet and and SD card slot. It supports “Power over Ethernet”, meaning the board can be powered via a connected ethernet cable. Not much more info was made available.
- Massimo Banzi announced the TinkerKit. This is a kit consisting of various electronics components, mostly sensors and actuators on breakout boards for easy and rapid prototyping. This kit was previously only made available to institions, like museums and schools, but will be available to all from October 18.
- A new Arduino IDE (version 0020) is available for download, supporting the new Arduino boards.
- And finally, the Arduino.cc website has undergone a massive update. New design for stronger branding, much improved documentation and examples (including schematics and Fritzing images for all the examples). And, by dope demand, an online store. It is not there yet, but will launch in october.
More information can be found at the new website, arduino.cc and AdaFruit posted a great FAQ on the new Arduino Uno. To hear the news directly from the horse’s mouth, see the video of the announcement at World Maker Faire last weekend.
