MORE ABOUT Arduino

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…

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 at the 2015 Rome Maker Faire, the new Intel Curie-based Arduino/Genuino 101 board is now shipping. According to the Internet the ‘101’ is meant to be the successor of the Arduino Uno. One of these boards landed on my desk, and so I gave it a try.

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.

Last week at Elektor.Labs we were honored by Coen de Bruijn stopping by to demonstrate the project he has been working on for the last year or so. Not satisfied with classic monochrome 7-segment displays we all know so well Coen set out to develop his own full-color 7-segment displays. After lots of experimenting and several rounds of prototyping finally the RGBdigit saw the light. Here is Coen's story.