A new development board has been released from the Arduino stable of development products. This board has been developed jointly by Atmel and Arduino and targets ‘The next generation of IoT development’.

The Zero board contains an Atmel SAMD21 microcontroller, built around the 32-bit ARM Cortex M0+ processor. The board also packs 256 KB of flash and 32 KB of SRAM. Shield connectors are Arduino R3 compatible at 3.3 V. The (EDBG) Atmel embedded software debugger is available to aid program development.

Acording to Massimo Banzi, co-founder and CEO at Arduino “The Zero board expands the Arduino family by providing increased performance to fuel creativity of the Maker community. The flexible feature set enables endless project opportunities for devices and acts as a great educational tool for learning about 32-bit application development".

Reza Kazerounian, the senior vice president and general manager of microcontroller business at Atmel said that “Leveraging more than 15 years of experience since the inception of AVR, simplicity and ease-of-use have been at the core of Atmel’s technology. Atmel is pleased to see the continued growth of the global maker community stemming from the increasing access and availability to open source platforms such as Arduino. We enable makers, but the power lies within the makers themselves”.

The first prototypes of the Arduino Zero board will be revealed at the Maker Faire Bay Area 2014 due to be held between the 17th and 18th May in San Mateo, USA.