Arduino Uno, one of the most popular microcontroller boards on the market, was released in 2010 and the Uno R3 has been the standard for over ten years. Yesterday, the company announced the upcoming Arduino Uno R4 board, which will be a huge leap forward in power and performance.
The Arduino Uno R4 board, which will go on sale in May at an unknown price.or, it will be available in normal version and with WiFi. The wireless version will feature an Espressif S3 module that supports connectivity wifi and Bluetooth.
Arduino Uno R4 will keep the same pinout as its predecessor, but with a Renesas RA4M1 32-bit 48 MHz CPU. This is a huge improvement over the 8-bit 16 MHz ATmega328P processor in previous Unos.
The new chip is based on the Arm Cortex M4 architecture, versus the RISC-based AVR platform of the previous processor. Arduino claims that most existing software libraries should work without modification, but some optimized for AVR may need to be tweaked.
The Uno R4 will have 32K of SRAM, which is 16 times more than the 2K of the Uno R3. It will also have 256K of NAND on board versus the R3’s 32K. There’s a USB-C port for connecting a PC instead of the clunky MicroUSB on previous models. The power connector remains, but can now handle up to 24V instead of 20V.
Secrets to reveal and no official price for the Arduino
In the official photo of the Uno R4, Arduino has put yellow and green boxes on parts of the PCB. In its statement, the company said it’s maintaining an element of surprise and won’t reveal what’s under the boxes until closer to launch.
If you want to be among the first to buy the Arduino Uno R4, you can sign up for the waiting list that will notify you when the board is for sale. There is also an early adoption program for developers who have written popular libraries. If you are accepted into the program, the company will send you one for free.
Although we don’t know how much the Uno R4 will cost, It seems safe to assume that the basic version will cost $25 or more., since that is what the Uno R3 currently costs. The Uno R4 WiFi will obviously be more expensive.