LENSThe classic board gets a revamp
UNO WIFI REV 2
FV No, absolutely not. We’re a sort of Switzerland.
The company is a Swiss company! But besides
this joke, we are trying to be the Switzerland
of hardware so we can work with Intel, we can
work with ARM, we can work with Microchip/
AVR technology and to be honest, the relationship
with ARM is really amazing, and they are really
inclusive as well, so there is no influence on our
strategy. Even the latest announcement [the
Vidor FPGA], we announced this Intel/Altera part.
There’s a lot of knowledge in our community
about the AVR parts – probably more so than
the 32-bit Cortex technology – so we wanted to
reward this loyalty and allow them to do more
stuff with the knowledge they have. Creating
a path for them to evolve, but also creating a
platform for what they know.HackSpace There’s a wide range of connection
options available on the MKR boards. Are we
likely to see more of these come to the Uno?FV For [many types] of connectivity they require
a little bit more power and resources on the
microcontroller side, so to make them compatible
with the Uno format, the most appropriate choice
is to have them on a shield; it’s also the problem of
power management and security.ince 2010, the Arduino Uno has
been the go-to board for anyone
who wants to learn to use
microcontrollers. It’s not very
powerful by modern standards, but
its ease of use and huge amount of
online support make it easy to get started.
As you may guess from the name, this isn’t
the first time Arduino has added WiFi to the Uno,
but the previous version wasn’t supported as
fully, and got caught in the rift between the two
Arduino organisations. This new board will be
fully supported by the Arduino ecosystem, and
work with existing Uno shields.HackSpace Why did you develop the Uno WiFi?Fabio Violante The idea was that we have a ton of
users of the Uno board, but in many cases people
want to connect [but still] leverage the ecosystem
of shields that are available for the traditional
boards. So, we decided to combine a new version
of the AVR microcontroller – the 4809 from
Microchip (that has a little bit more RAM and
flash, which is very important for a connected
application) – with a module from U-blox that
uses the ESP32. It’s a very reliable WiFi module –
and we also added an IMU. In many cases, both
professional and educational users can take
advantage of having an embedded IMU for doing
simple stuff. This is a product that will be useful to
prototype a number of situations. We are always
committed to supporting the traditional format
of ours. This is one of a number of innovations
that we will be introducing in the future on the
traditional form factors.HackSpace The Uno WiFi revision 2 uses
a Microchip AVR, but Arduino is now in a
relationship with ARM – is this a problem?S
“
THIS NEW BOARD WILL BE FULLY
SUPPORTED BY THE ARDUINO ECOSYSTEM,
AND WORK WITH EXISTING UNO SHIELDS
”