To commemorate Arduino Day 2016, the foundation has announced the Arduino MKR1000 and Genuino MKR1000 developer boards are available for Internet of Things (IoT) developers.

The developer board specifications are identical, but the foundation uses the Genuino name outside of the United States. The board has three main blocks, which feature a SAM D21 Cortex-M0+ 32-bit low-power ARM microprocessor, WINC1500 low-power 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, and ECC 508 CryptoAuthentication.

“Arduino MKR1000 has been designed to offer a practical and cost effective solution for makers seeking to add Wi-Fi connectivity to their projects with minimal previous experience in networking,” said the organization on its product page.

Arduino is an open-source prototyping system based on simple-to-understand hardware and software. Arduino boards interpret physical, mechanical and electronic inputs – like a sensor seeing a light flash, a button pushed by a finger, or a targeted Tweet – and convert it to an output – like activating a motor, illuminating an LED display, or publishing to a webpage- by sending instructions to the board’s microcontroller. Programmers use the Arduino programming language and Arduino Software (IDE).

Arduino has developed the boards specifically for IoT, which usually requires low-power and Wi-Fi for connected devices. Low-power is necessary for IoT devices to ensure that they don’t require a lot of energy to continuously send information to the hub.

The developer board works with Zero and Wi-Fi Shield boards, offering compatibility to developers that’ve already started building an IoT system using Arduino.



1,000 lucky winners get a free Arduino Day gift

A thousand winners of the World’s largest Arduino Maker Challenge will be given the MKR1000, which costs $35 internationally. Arduino claims that its board allows developers to create an IoT system with minimal networking experience, building on the organization’s goals of making coding and hardware development open and easy.

The IoT market is growing at a rapid rate, making it the perfect area for budding developers and engineers that want to create hardware or learn how to build an IoT system.