Arduino is one of the pillars of the movement maker. If you like to play with electronics and create different types of devices or accessories using free hardware and software, you surely know this name. The arduino unoone of the most popular boards in the project, will be updated after a long time with major improvements.
The announcement, which comes to us from Arduino Day 2023, is excellent news for the community. For more than a decade the Arduino Uno has served to bring countless electronic ideas to life, and now everything seems to indicate that it will continue to do so for a long time. The new Arduino Uno R4 improves in almost everything to the previous revision (the R3).
A long-awaited update
As we say, there are interesting changes to the popular board, but also some elements have been kept intact to keep compatibility of hardware with existing projects and the functionality of Shields (Shields) or backpacks. In the case, the Arduino Uno R4 retains the form factor, the 5 V voltage and the pinout of the previous one.
Now, in terms of news, we find a new 32-bit Renesas RA4M1 processor that runs at 48 MHz. This is a substantial improvement over the previous 8-bit, 16 MHz ATmega328P. There are also architecture changes: the heart of the Arduino Uno R4 is based on Arm Cortex M4 and the previous one on AVR RISC.
At this point, Arduino assures that it has been working to guarantee the compatibility of the revision of the board at the software level. This looks for both the code and the existing tutorials keep being useful. Of course, it is possible that some of these stop working with the architecture change and need to be optimized.
The Arduino Uno R4 will have 16 times more RAM than the R3
At the RAM memory level, the Arduino Uno R4 will have 32K of SRAM, which is 16 times more than the 2K of the R3. As for the NAND, it will arrive with 256K compared to the 32K of the existing model. Another good news is that it comes with a USB-C port with a maximum voltage of 24 V and, in case we opt for the WiFi version (there will be two versions), with an Espressif S3 WiFi module.
There are some elements that have not been revealed. Arduino has decided to leave us with the intrigue until end of May, which is when this version will be released. We’ll also have to wait for pricing, but it should be around $25, which is what the Uno R3 costs. The latter, it should be noted, will not be discontinued and will continue to be sold.
In the Arduino catalog we can find more than 20 proposals, the bases to give life to a wide range of projects. From a connected scale to a home access system using biometric identification or a BB8 robot like the one in Star Wars. In other words, a piece whose limits to create things are found in the imagination.
Images: Arduino
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism