Wednesday, March 31, 2010

New(ish) "Official" Arduinos

The Arduino FIO, announced at the New York Uno Punto Zero meeting, is Shigeru Kobayashi's Funnel I/O board, now officially in the Arduino stable, manufactured and sold by SparkFun Electronics ($25). It runs at 3.3V, at 8MHz, and includes voltage regulation, a LiPo charging chip, and an XBee socket. Note that the USB connector is only for power, not for programming.

The Arduino Nano 3.0 by Gravitech ($35) got a lot of press in the last week after being stocked in the Make: Magazine Maker Shed (though it was actually rolled out in July). This revision has LEDs for power, RX, TX, and D13; auto power sensing; power regulation and USB programming interface-- pretty much everything a full-sized Arduino has, plus the two extra analog input pins available on the smd ATmega328.

Both are listed on my comprehensive Arduino-compatible boards spreadsheet. I find it interesting that neither of these conforms to the original Arduino form factor, which makes sense given how little space smd components occupy and how often auxiliary circuits are built on solderless breadboards. Still, breadboard tinkerers miss out on the awesome functionality built into shields, which was the motivation behind the Minimalduino board.

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