Arduino to add ARM board this year

Pre-release developer version on sale within days

The DIY hardware enthusiast’s platform of choice, Arduino, will be shipping a new ARM-based platform this year.

The organization showed off the new version in time for the New York Maker’s Faire, with a 96 MHz clock speed, 256 KB of flash memory, 50 KB of SRAM, five SPI buses, two I2C interfaces, five UARTs and 16 12-bit analog interfaces.

Arduino says that instead of shipping the board as a finished product, it is opening the platform early in the design process, with a batch of “developer edition” Arduino Due boards to go on sale soon. “We plan a final and tested release by the end of 2011”, the blog post states.

Its other big news is a WiFi shield designed for “maximum hackability”. Based on an H&D micro WiFi module with full TCP/IP stack on-board, the WiFi shield will work with any Arduino module. The outfit says its aim is that the new module should operate as a replacement for the Ethernet shield with only “minor” changes to existing code.

There’s also a simplified board, the Leonardo, using the Atmega32u4, with USB drivers for mouse, keyboard and serial port emulation. ®