

The Arduino Uno board

Source: Arduino.cc Open source hardware group, the Arduino Team, has announced two new Arduino micro-controller boards for open source hackers and developers to experiment with. Arduino's board designs offer a micro-controller with numerous analogue and digital connections and a USB / Serial interface. The board designs are open source and there is a thriving community which uses the boards to create interactive objects and experiment with electronics. Some community members even use the design to build their own version of the Arduino board themselves.

The new Arduino Uno is designed to replace the popular Duemilanove board. The Uno replaces the previous USB interface with a custom interface built around the Atmel ATMega8U2. The developers says this will allow the board to be used over USB without drivers on Linux and Mac OS X (and only a simple .inf file is needed for Windows). The other new board, the Arduino Mega 2560, is an upgrade to the Arduino Mega and will sport the new USB circuitry and the ATMega2560 processor with twice as much flash memory, though the developers are currently wrestling with the GCC compiler to unlock more than 128K of that memory. Both boards will use Arduino's newly allocated USB Vendor ID, allowing the boards to identify themselves as Arduino devices when plugged into other devices.

The new devices were launched over the weekend at Maker Faire in New York City, where the group also unveiled a new logo, plans for an Arduino branded webstore (which will open on the 18th of October) and progress on development of an Arduino board with integrated Ethernet interface and micro-SD connector.

(djwm)