At the heart of the new board sits Atmel's SMART SAM R21 device, a system-on-chip (SoC) based on a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0+ processor together with an ultra-low-power 2.4 GHz ISM band transceiver capable of upt to 250 kbit/s. This family of devices, available in 32- and 48-pin packages with up to 256 KB Flash, 32 KB of SRAM, operates at a maximum frequency of 48 MHz, reaching 2.14 Coremark/MHz. Besides the standard peripherals the SoC integrates a 12-channel event system for inter-peripheral signaling and an optional 512 KB serial Flash memory. Being an Atmel device, support for capacitive touch buttons, sliders and wheels has not been forgotten.

The new evaluation board runs on the mbed IoT Device Platform, a platform provided by ARM that consists of a lightweight OS for client devices (mbed OS) and the matching cloud server software to interact with the device (mbed Device Server) plus the tools and developer ecosystem that make the rapid deployment of standards-based IoT solutions possible.

For several years mbed has remained limited to a few small microcontroller platforms but ever since the introduction of the mbed IoT Device Platform in 2014 the number of mbed supporting silicon and board providers has steadily increased. It will be interesting to see how non-ARM manufacturers like Microchip and Imagination will respond. Will FlowCloud vs mbed be the clash of 2016?