Maker Faire Bay Area is traditionally the place for ”maker” innovations to be announced and quite a few were spawned by the Arduino organization, clearly showing their commitment to help makers move “upstream” towards the professional world.

For example! The first-ever Arduino board featuring an FPGA chip is called MKR Vidor 4000 where MKR is pronounced maker. Sized 25 x 75mm and with a wide variety of wireless interfaces to choose from, “MKR” is actually a family of boards aimed at developing IoT products.

The four main components on the Vidor 4000 board are:

  • FPGA: Intel/Altera Cyclone MAX10
  • CPU: SAMD21ARm Cortex-M0+
  • Wi-Fi: U-blox Nina W102-00B
  • Crypto: ECC508

Also announced by Arduino are additions to the Arduino IDE which should allow pre-configured FPGA code to be installed, and drag-and-drop FPGA configuration through a new internet-based development environment. Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi summarized it nicely by saying, “People will not need to know anything about the underlying Verilog.”

The range of MKR boards is up for expansion, and will be supported by carrier boards “below” and other interface boards “on top”.