MORE ABOUT Arduino

Not long after the announcement by Intel that they would be withdrawing many of their embedded products, Sony have decided to enter the fray and will be showcasing an Arduino-compatible development board at the Tokyo Maker Faire. The board specification promises a multi-core ARM processor and built-in GPS/GLONASS capability...

The FreeSoC2 PSoC® 5LP Dev Board uses Cypress ARM processors and built-in configurable hardware to make a versatile system that can be used in the Arduino IDE or in the Cypress PSoC Creator environment (which offers many significant advantages). We take a quick look at the board to discover just some of the powerful features it has to offer. The FreeSoC2 PSoC® 5LP Dev Board is now available from the Elektor Store as part of a promotion.

Now available in the Elektor Store is Matthew Scarpino’s book Motors for Makers. From start to finish, you'll learn through practical examples, crystal-clear explanations, and photos. If you've ever salivated at what you could do with electric motors, stop salivating…and start making!

The Pretzel board is a really useful tool especially when you are starting out with networks. Now however it was time to try out a different type of board. We took a look at the ESP32 which is the more powerful cousin of the ESP8266 with many more peripheral functions built-in...

Open-source hardware is meerting open-source instruction set architecture with SiFive announcing their Arduino Cinque — an Arduino development board employing the RISC-V ISA (Instruction Set Architecture). After the $59 HiFive1 from late 2016, the Cinque is the second RISC-V based development board released by SiFive.

The ESP8266 from Espressif has made waves in the maker community with its low price: you can get one from AliExpress for just two or three euros/ dollars/pounds. Its big brother, the ESP32, is the result of Espressif’s efforts to make their WLAN SoCs fit for the future. Along with a dual-core processor, it has onboard Bluetooth, more RAM, and IO extensions. In this article we talk about programming the ESP32 with the Arduino IDE. In the next issue of Elektor we will turn our attention to the native development tool IDF.

At the end of last year the feud that has for so long split Arduino asunder seemed to have been resolved. Massimo Banzi announced at the World Maker Faire New York that a single united IDE is being created in a nonprofit foundation. He went on to say “The Arduino Foundation will allow us to champion the core values of the Arduino Community within the open source ecosystem and make our commitment to open source stronger than ever.” It also has a manifesto (in PDF) outlining many beautiful ideas and goals for the foundation. There are also some troubling undercurrents...

Designed by Clemens Valens at Elektor.LABS, the AVR Playground – a playful reference to the Arduino forum known as the Arduino Playground – is a hybrid of an Arduino Uno and a traditional micro-controller development board. It is intended for ‘doing Arduino’ without bad connections and loose wires (although it doesn’t disallow it). It provides an easy way to start learning the microcontroller without having to solder or add other components. 

As you well know, the Arduino is "the" basic component in the maker community, however to expand its capabilities makers are still largely on their own. To really make the most of the Arduino, and explore the projects in which it can be used, it means getting back to basics which can often cause major problems — and that's where the book Home Automation Projects with Arduino begins.

This timelapse video shows you how easily the Arduino Tinkerkit* Braccio Robotic Arm kit can be assembled. While manipulating the different parts and screwing it together, you will learn a lot about how it actually works. The assembly is real fun, and thanks to the Arduino test sketch found in the examples, aligning the servomotors is a piece of cake too. Soon you’ll be familiar with the arm itself and learn how to control its movements through your smartphone.