MORE ABOUT Arduino

After a painful argument about, say, two years ago that led to the creation of two independent Arduino organizations, LLC (or .cc) and SRL (.org), forcing Arduino enthusiasts to install two development environments in order to work with all the available Arduino-compatible products, the two former enemies announced on the World Maker Faire New York a settlement. A new holding will be created for the two entities before the end of 2016 and Arduino will be one as before.

Competition is fierce among microcontroller manufacturers. One of the reasons is that putting an MCU together has become pretty easy: just license a core from a well-known UK MCU core designer (no, not IKEA), buy some peripheral IPs from other vendors, put it all on a chip and away you go. The result is an exponential growing number of MCUs and ditto manufacturers. However, making an MCU is one thing, selling it is quite another and so MCU manufacturers are designing all sorts of product evaluation boards intended to trick a maximum number of potential users into using their products.

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.