Review: mCookie modules make Arduino rhyme with Lego®

What’s the difference between Marco Polo and Arduino? None, they both started off small in Italy and prospered in China. Seriously though, I owe you a Test Bench and have in front of me two similar products, the Grove Starter Kit for Arduino, and the mCookie 301 expert kit offered by Microduino. I’ve only got space for one here, so eeny, meeny, miny, mo…

Various circular animations and blinking multi-colour light effects are possible with this simple 32 LED circle. It runs from two CR2032 batteries. The red, yellow and green LEDs are driven by an ATmega328p, easily programmed with the Arduino IDE. Since this microcontroller lacks the outputs to drive so many LEDs individually, these are arranged in a 4 x 8 matrix (only 12 outputs required).

When a manufacturer releases a B version of an existing product the differences between the old and the new are usually small. Not so in the case of Atmel’s ATmega328P, the processor at the heart of the Arduino Uno R3. The B-type of this MCU has so many extra features that a new revision of the R3 is justified. Enter the Elektor Uno R4.

A few months after the introduction of the Arduino/Genuino 101 Intel has now released the source code of the operating system that makes this board work. The package contains the Board Support Package (BSP) for the Curie system-on-chip (SoC). The firmware is intended to be built only on 64-bit Ubuntu systems.

After the 4-way B-Bender for Telecaster guitar, worked with pedals controlled by an Arduino, here is another invention from the same musician in the form of a very original hybrid electronic instrument, comprising 3 percussion pads, 3 potentiometer ribbons, a joystick and an Arduino Micro.

This board is an evolution of the Arduino Uno R3 board. Identical form factor as the Uno but based on the ATmega328PB-AU, this board has many more features than the Uno. Because it is backwards compatible you can think of it as revision 4 of the Uno, which is why we called it the R4.

You like the Telecaster B-Bender? Means nothing to you? But there is a strong chance that you’ve heard it and appreciated the effect, without even knowing it existed. It’s a mechanism which, on an electric guitar, allows the musician, while he is playing, to move the tone of the B-string up or down and obtain a portamento or glissando melodic effect.

While its northern neighbor is preparing for war and the end of the world as we know it, South Korea is investing in a friendlier future where the children of today develop the technology of tomorrow. To achieve this goal it was decided to rework the Arduino platform a bit to make it safer for children.

About himself, Guido Bonelli writes 'my mission is to expand upon an already awesome hardware platform by providing equally awesome and unique shields for the hobbyist, inventor, DIY’er or anyone else curious about Arduino'. His Dr.Duino™ board makes debugging Arduino as easy as programming Arduino! Forget now about spaghettis and juggling with probes. On the World’s first Arduino Breakout board, all Arduino pins are brought out to headers for easy probe access, even when your Uno is connected to one or more shields.

Announced a few months ago at the Rome Maker Faire 2015, the new Intel Curie-based Arduino/Genuino 101 board is now finally shipping. One of these boards landed on my desk, so I gave it a try.