10 ms·

Arduino Uno R4

173 points by kaycebasques 4y ago

sho_hn 4y ago
What's missing from this announcement for me is a comparison of current draw, sleep states, etc. It's nice to get more powerful within a form factor and voltage and so on, and I realize many applications don't care about energy use, but increasingly the metric I care about with DIY/MCU gear (and my phone and my laptop is) "watt-for-watt performance increase". With DIY stuff especially because I build battery-powered things here and there, and recharging once a year instead of once a month is a massive reduction in nuisance for stuff around the house. I dream of low power compute where I can consistently get away with solar or kinetic energy harvesting to reduce operational maintenance to 0!
- dragontamer 4y ago
  The microcontroller is under 20mA easily, and under 10mA typical use. https://www.renesas.com/us/en/document/mah/renesas-ra4m1-group-users-manual-hardware?r=1054146 https://www.renesas.com/us/en/document/mah/renesas-ra4m1-gro... I'm a bit lothe to admit it, but for beginners... anything under 50mA probably doesn't matter. So that includes Teensy Boards, RP2040, Arduino Uno, this new Arduino, etc. etc. A typical LED draws 20mA for example, while WiFi will draw 100mA or more. Ethernet also draws 100mA+. So its very difficult for a beginner to "care" about anything below 50mA. Its just not something worth caring about, because everything else in your circuit uses so much more power. ------- > With DIY stuff especially because I build battery-powered things here and there, and recharging once a year instead of once a month is a massive reduction in nuisance for stuff around the house. I dream of low power compute where I can consistently get away with solar or kinetic energy harvesting to reduce operational maintenance to 0! Just search on UltraLowPower (ULP) microcontrollers, such as the STM32L5 (or the next version: STM32U5, whenever that comes out). Low-power microcontrollers are measured in "microamps per MHz". https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32u5-series.html https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32... That's 16uA / MHz active on the STM32U5. Though it fails at the lower end of things (~1mA or ~2mA is just the cost of the clock itself, so you can't drop below that in active mode. Sleep modes turn off the clock of course and allow the ~100nA to 500nA sleep modes on these ULP chips though). STM32U5 isn't alone btw. There's plenty of competitors for this ultra-low power field.
  - sho_hn 4y ago
    I know all of this of course (but nevertheless thanks for spreading useful information) :-) What I'm saying is that I would really like this type of announcement to not take shape of absolute performance increase but at least include, if not focus, on performance-per-watt. I honestly don't agree with the "beginners won't care" - battery life is not a difficult concept and battery-powered projects are super common. And I think it is on Arduino to do this, since the value they provide as a middle-man is to package this BOM up as a product and explain it and their product design choices. As a sibling points out power efficiency can also vary with other component choices on the breakout board, e.g. the power delivery or included BMS. This is also something Arduino could optimize for and market as they productize. The MCU datasheet isn't everything.
    - twawaaay 4y ago
      20mA is an equivalent of a typical LED. And if that is too much for you to power a microcontroller you do what you do with a normal LED -- you do not power it all the time and instead you use it when it is needed and put to sleep when it is not. So I fully agree with the parent comment that for an amateur once you got to this point, further improvements on power efficiency here is pretty much inconsequential. It is not like you are going to be building a watch or a sensor that will have to work for years on a single AAA. A 20mA microcontroller will be sufficient for pretty much any project an amateur can think of, power usage wise.
      - sho_hn 4y ago
        "Putting it to sleep" is where a lot of details matter. Different MCUs don't have parity on what sleep states and options they offer and what they mean in practice. Often there are complex tables where certain wakeup schemes are only available in certain sleep states, and to extract minimum idle draw you need to know what you're doing. The Arduino framework currently offers only minimal abstraction over this. If you use Arduino on an esp32, you have to reach into ESP-IDF API to dial in the details, e.g. set up ext1 wakeup and disable the RTC memory explicitly if you don't need it. Betting this is the same here at launch. Arduino here is introducing two versions of the same product with widely different BOMs and not addressing this matter at all. I think it'd be a great enhancement of their productization effort if they started explaining power envelope, showing improvements over time, standardized an API (derived from actual use cases) etc. This would add value over the raw chips and datasheets for their audience of beginners looking for ease of use. Without it this is just throwing some random new breakout boards with the same layouts over the fence - a very crowded market - and banking on ecosystem effects without evolving the ecosystem and tackling new aspects.
- teraflop 4y ago
  Just from a glance at the microcontroller datasheets, it looks like the RA4M1's current draw in "Software Standby" mode is much lower than the older ATmega328P's "power down" mode (5μA vs. ~50μA). But IIRC, the voltage regulators in previous Arduino boards already waste orders of magnitude more current than that, even while quiescent, making them not very suitable for battery-powered applications. So it remains to be seen if the R4 board improves on this.
  - sho_hn 4y ago
    One thing that's makes the product line a bit hard to reason about is that they have a Wifi and a non-Wifi version using two very different MCUs with very different power use characteristics. I.e. even if you have Wifi disabled on the Wifi version, it'll behave very differently from the non-Wifi board. People looking up numbers or experiences will have a harder time. Add to this that afaict, the Arduino framework API currently doesn't provide fantastic abstractions for power/state management either. I had an Arduino-based esp32 project once and extracting best deep sleep performance definitely required reaching lower into ESP-IDF API instead (e.g. the difference between ext0 and ext1 wakeups and being able to shut off RTC memory in one but not the other). That means with the current framework, you have to potentially write non-portable code between two different versions of the "same Uno R4" if you want to optimize for low power. All of embedded is like this, really - scanning through and understanding a product line is basically a required skill - but meh, what a mess for beginners.
    - nfriedly 4y ago
      I could be wrong, but my reading of the post was that the Wi-Fi version has two MCUs - the main RA4M1, and the S3 WiFi module. So, if you turn off wi-fi, they should be effectively the same board.
  - wombat_trouble 4y ago
    I'd wager that 99% of Arduino enthusiasts (and a good percentage of industrial hw engineers...) do not have a habit of using power save modes on bare metal.
- mNovak 4y ago
  I agree, considering that much of their marketing surrounds DIY automation and they have this whole IoT cloud platform now, they very little support for low-power operation. In this regard I think Adafuit and Seeed platforms do much better, while still being very beginner friendly.
microtonal 4y ago
These boards confuse me so much. The microcontroller is a Renesas RA4M1 running at 48MHz. However, the Wifi version uses an Espressif S3 module. However the S3 is a dual core microcontroller that runs up to 240 MHz. Why not base the board on that, or perhaps even the RISC-V version of ESP32? ESP32 has plenty of pins, deep sleep, etc. Is it only to keep pinout/5V compatibility with older Unos? I think their bigger problem is that there are a lot of good competitors now and their boards are severely overpriced for what they offer.
- asddubs 4y ago
  if they weren't going to keep compatibility, there would be no point in going with the same form factor (and they could fix the awkward spacing that one of the headers has) - this is meant as something that will work with the various shields that are available.
- leokeba 4y ago
  Exactly my thought, this seems like a bunch of design compromises mostly towards backwards-compatibility, but I suspect they also did not want to make their flagship product reliant on a chinese MCU, hence the no-wifi variant.
- 0xDEF 4y ago
  A low-power ARM MCU like that can run for years. There are wireless sensors based on TI's wireless ARM Cortex-M3 solutions that can run for years before needing a battery replacement.
  - microtonal 4y ago
    The Renesas uses 5µA/11.4µA with peripheral clocks disabled/enabled. The ESP32 2.5µA/10µA respectively. So it does even slightly better.
dale_glass 4y ago
A nice improvement, but maybe too little too late? I mean, what's the point? An ESP32 has 320K SRAM, 448K Flash and a 240 MHz dual core CPU. And it costs peanuts. That's the competition to beat, and this doesn't reach it, even though the ESP32 came out in 2016. The Arduino has been resting on its laurels for too long, I'm afraid. There's long been things out there much faster and cheaper, and with wifi out there for a long time. EDIT: And why not just use one of these, which is already for sale? https://freematics.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=59 https://freematics.com/store/index.php?route=product/product...
- okl 4y ago
  I'm not into Arduinos but I think they are not selling their products because they have the largest RAM or the fastest CPU but because of the Arduino IDE, the language and the community.
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    The ESP32 can be programmed through the Arduino IDE, using the exact same language. I've done that. Now the ESP32 as usually delivered is not pin or voltage compatible, but surely that's not that hard of a problem. Just make an Arduino shaped board for it, and use a level shifter? In fact this very thing seems to exist: https://freematics.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=59 https://freematics.com/store/index.php?route=product/product...
    - ta988 4y ago
      So now you need to add a level shifer increase the number of mistakes and the risk of ruining your board. Your solution makes life of hobbyists less enjoyable IMHO. The GPIO are not level shifted in the board you link.
      - dale_glass 4y ago
        Maybe that's not the right board, but a level shifter is what, $1 or so? Could be on the board itself easily.
numpad0 4y ago
Should I feel relieved that the main chip is not carrying scary prefixes and suffixes like CXD, APQ, uPD, MB, etc., or be absolutely horrified still that it’s a Renesas built ARM?
- okl 4y ago
  If you take a look at the Renesas website, you'll find that the product names look like this: "R7FA4M1AB3CFL#HA0". Renesas has a larger portfolio including, e.g., RISC-V chips. What's the problem?
  - numpad0 4y ago
    The pain. Of messing with Japanese traditional companies.
    - dark-star 4y ago
      can you elaborate? I have used plenty of Renesas-powered devices in the past and didn't have any problems...
stratosgear 4y ago
Why are parts of the board covered, in their photo? Which parts are under there?
- qwery 4y ago
  Don't know, but it certainly jumped out at me. All I could think of was that some part of the design isn't finalised and/or hiding part of it (or an identifying mark?) in an attempt to delay the counterfeiters.
timmaxw 4y ago
The Uno is one of the best boards for beginners due to its huge ecosystem of tutorials, accessories, etc. But for a long time the Uno was stuck on the same 8-bit core for backwards-compatibility reasons, even as alternative boards offered much better specs. If the R4 can offer better specs without fragmenting the ecosystem, it will be a winner for beginners IMO.
josephcsible 4y ago
IMO, this is so different from the three previous UNOs that they should have made up a new name for it instead of calling it an UNO.
- AviationAtom 4y ago
  DOS?
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    They're Italian, so they'd say "due" instead of "dos", which they've already used: https://docs.arduino.cc/hardware/due https://docs.arduino.cc/hardware/due Ditto for "tre": https://docs.arduino.cc/retired/boards/arduino-tre https://docs.arduino.cc/retired/boards/arduino-tre It looks like they haven't used "quattro" themselves, but a popular Arduino-based robotics project has, so using it for a new board would be confusing. They've used "cinque" too: https://hackaday.com/2017/05/20/arduino-cinque-the-risc-v-esp32-wifi-bluetooth-arduino/ https://hackaday.com/2017/05/20/arduino-cinque-the-risc-v-es... "Sei" isn't used, but it'd cause confusion when people search for how to enable interrupts on Arduinos. So I think "sette" would be the next good candidate if they wanted to name it after a number.
    - AviationAtom 4y ago
      Fair point. My thought process tends to be a bit more biased towards the Espanol than the Italiano.
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tiedieconderoga 4y ago
At first I thought it was really strange that they chose a slow Renesas MCU, while also including an ESP32 module. Arduino has always been priced at an extreme premium which they justified by publishing easy-to-use software libraries, though. Maybe it's good that we'll have a widely-supported hobby board that uses something besides Microchip/ST/Espressif. Maybe with a more diverse ecosystem, we could see a decent vendor-agnostic HAL someday.
ohazi 4y ago
What's up with the yellow rectangle?
- inamberclad 4y ago
  Caught my eye too. Looks like they're hiding part of the board design?
  - numpad0 4y ago
    From the link: > The board provides a CAN bus, which allows users to minimize wiring and execute different tasks in parallel by connecting multiple shields. From [0]: > The Renesas RA4M1 group of micrcontrollers (MCUs) uses the high-performance Arm® Cortex®-M4 core and offers a segment LCD controller and a capacitive touch sensing unit input for intensive HMI designs. Maybe a CAN bus connector, or finally a builtin user interface, if it's not just a power circuit? Built-in LCD/OLED, buttons, basic shell casing and end-user usable expansion connectors are growing trends among China/Shenzhen originating platforms like M5Stack. Arduino is still relying on hacky solutions for UI, which might be less appealing for casual users. 0: https://www.renesas.com/us/en/products/microcontrollers-microprocessors/ra-cortex-m-mcus/ra4m1-32-bit-microcontrollers-48mhz-arm-cortex-m4-and-lcd-controller-and-cap-touch-hmi https://www.renesas.com/us/en/products/microcontrollers-micr...
qwertox 4y ago
How popular are Arduinos nowadays? I've used them years ago and they were great, they taught me about how to program and use the ATMegas and generally how to program close to hardware. But then the Raspberry Pis came along and showed me how useful more processing power is, and for the microcontroller stuff the ESP8266 and then the ESP32 showed me that having WiFi directly on the MCU is so much better than just an Arduino, for which I used to buy really long cables. There was a time when I then paired Arduinos with ESP8266 in order to integrate them into the network, but since the ESP32 I've never looked back. And yet I see new Arduinos being offered and just wonder who is buying them nowadays. Since I haven't informed myself for years on them, maybe I'm really missing out on something?
- kennywinker 4y ago
  Depends on what you're building. Raspberry Pi's are hard to obtain, much more expensive, overkill for tons of tasks, and involve learning or already knowing a bunch of linux / sysadmin knowledge. In my experience, arduinos get picked over ESP32s mostly because someone's already done what you want with an arduino so you can leverage existing code/projects. Not every project needs wifi, or 240mhz, or 32bits. And in those cases, the beaten path is the best choice. That said, yeah, esp32 gets picked a lot even when the wifi isn't needed, because it's starting to be the beaten path.
Yoofie 4y ago
I found it strange that they are using a ARM Renesas chip instead of your more well known brands such as ST Micro, NXP or Microchip. Renesas was fairly late on using ARM cores compared to the rest of the industry. Then I read the comment on CNX-Software. Renesas has invested 10 million dollar to Arduino. [1]. Now it makes sense. Gotta follow the money. [1]: https://www.renesas.com/us/en/about/press-room/renesas-announces-investment-popular-open-source-company-arduino-access-huge-developer-community https://www.renesas.com/us/en/about/press-room/renesas-annou...
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  It's kind of telling that Renesas, which combined the semiconductor businesses of NEC, Hitachi, and Mitsubishi, isn't a "well known brand". Ouch, that burn is bloody epic.
  - numpad0 4y ago
    It’s their ARM chip that isn’t well known. The company itself is, kind of. Think of a Sukhoi civilian jet next to a line of fighter jets carrying both Su and MiG prefixes.
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hd95489 4y ago
More power but still no rtc on the baseline. The 12 bit dac is an improvement for pulse width modulation. Though I’ll be honest I think most people use these for smart switches and power modulation devices so better dac is nice.
spiritplumber 4y ago
For industrial stuff I tend to use the Parallax Propeller. It was ahead of its time when it came out, it still holds its own well (and the propeller 2 is a beast) and it can take a beating electrically.
97s 4y ago
I know a lot of people above don't think it means much, but I built a machine from scratch(for my business equipment) with no knowledge of any of this stuff using Arduino and it was one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever had. There is something to be said about making hardware and software interface so easy like they have done. I would have never achieved this in the 3 month period as quickly as I did without Arduino. Super excited for this new Uno.
benbojangles 4y ago
do the pinouts become 3.3v instead of arduino uno 5v?
far_focus 4y ago
I received an Arduino Uno starter kit from my grandfather many many years ago on my birthday; it got me started coding before I even realized I was coding. I don't even think I was a teenager? Only years later when I took my first programming course at college, did I realize :) Glad to see the original uno hardware updated -- I distinctly remember running out of flash memory, because I copied and pasted the blinking LED code hundreds and hundreds of times. I didn't know about for or while loops !
ur-whale 4y ago
The specs are rather underwhelming in 2023. While the Uno was a revolution in many regards, this very much feels like a weak attempt at catching up to an ESP32 board. Not sure why I would ever want to buy one of these given what already exists out there.

173 points by kaycebasques 4y ago

What's missing from this announcement for me is a comparison of current draw, sleep states, etc. It's nice to get more powerful within a form factor and voltage and so on, and I realize many applications don't care about energy use, but increasingly the metric I care about with DIY/MCU gear (and my phone and my laptop is) "watt-for-watt performance increase". With DIY stuff especially because I build battery-powered things here and there, and recharging once a year instead of once a month is a massive reduction in nuisance for stuff around the house. I dream of low power compute where I can consistently get away with solar or kinetic energy harvesting to reduce operational maintenance to 0!

dragontamer 4y ago
The microcontroller is under 20mA easily, and under 10mA typical use. https://www.renesas.com/us/en/document/mah/renesas-ra4m1-group-users-manual-hardware?r=1054146 https://www.renesas.com/us/en/document/mah/renesas-ra4m1-gro... I'm a bit lothe to admit it, but for beginners... anything under 50mA probably doesn't matter. So that includes Teensy Boards, RP2040, Arduino Uno, this new Arduino, etc. etc. A typical LED draws 20mA for example, while WiFi will draw 100mA or more. Ethernet also draws 100mA+. So its very difficult for a beginner to "care" about anything below 50mA. Its just not something worth caring about, because everything else in your circuit uses so much more power. ------- > With DIY stuff especially because I build battery-powered things here and there, and recharging once a year instead of once a month is a massive reduction in nuisance for stuff around the house. I dream of low power compute where I can consistently get away with solar or kinetic energy harvesting to reduce operational maintenance to 0! Just search on UltraLowPower (ULP) microcontrollers, such as the STM32L5 (or the next version: STM32U5, whenever that comes out). Low-power microcontrollers are measured in "microamps per MHz". https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32u5-series.html https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32... That's 16uA / MHz active on the STM32U5. Though it fails at the lower end of things (~1mA or ~2mA is just the cost of the clock itself, so you can't drop below that in active mode. Sleep modes turn off the clock of course and allow the ~100nA to 500nA sleep modes on these ULP chips though). STM32U5 isn't alone btw. There's plenty of competitors for this ultra-low power field.
- sho_hn 4y ago
  I know all of this of course (but nevertheless thanks for spreading useful information) :-) What I'm saying is that I would really like this type of announcement to not take shape of absolute performance increase but at least include, if not focus, on performance-per-watt. I honestly don't agree with the "beginners won't care" - battery life is not a difficult concept and battery-powered projects are super common. And I think it is on Arduino to do this, since the value they provide as a middle-man is to package this BOM up as a product and explain it and their product design choices. As a sibling points out power efficiency can also vary with other component choices on the breakout board, e.g. the power delivery or included BMS. This is also something Arduino could optimize for and market as they productize. The MCU datasheet isn't everything.
  - twawaaay 4y ago
    20mA is an equivalent of a typical LED. And if that is too much for you to power a microcontroller you do what you do with a normal LED -- you do not power it all the time and instead you use it when it is needed and put to sleep when it is not. So I fully agree with the parent comment that for an amateur once you got to this point, further improvements on power efficiency here is pretty much inconsequential. It is not like you are going to be building a watch or a sensor that will have to work for years on a single AAA. A 20mA microcontroller will be sufficient for pretty much any project an amateur can think of, power usage wise.
    - sho_hn 4y ago
      "Putting it to sleep" is where a lot of details matter. Different MCUs don't have parity on what sleep states and options they offer and what they mean in practice. Often there are complex tables where certain wakeup schemes are only available in certain sleep states, and to extract minimum idle draw you need to know what you're doing. The Arduino framework currently offers only minimal abstraction over this. If you use Arduino on an esp32, you have to reach into ESP-IDF API to dial in the details, e.g. set up ext1 wakeup and disable the RTC memory explicitly if you don't need it. Betting this is the same here at launch. Arduino here is introducing two versions of the same product with widely different BOMs and not addressing this matter at all. I think it'd be a great enhancement of their productization effort if they started explaining power envelope, showing improvements over time, standardized an API (derived from actual use cases) etc. This would add value over the raw chips and datasheets for their audience of beginners looking for ease of use. Without it this is just throwing some random new breakout boards with the same layouts over the fence - a very crowded market - and banking on ecosystem effects without evolving the ecosystem and tackling new aspects.
teraflop 4y ago
Just from a glance at the microcontroller datasheets, it looks like the RA4M1's current draw in "Software Standby" mode is much lower than the older ATmega328P's "power down" mode (5μA vs. ~50μA). But IIRC, the voltage regulators in previous Arduino boards already waste orders of magnitude more current than that, even while quiescent, making them not very suitable for battery-powered applications. So it remains to be seen if the R4 board improves on this.
- sho_hn 4y ago
  One thing that's makes the product line a bit hard to reason about is that they have a Wifi and a non-Wifi version using two very different MCUs with very different power use characteristics. I.e. even if you have Wifi disabled on the Wifi version, it'll behave very differently from the non-Wifi board. People looking up numbers or experiences will have a harder time. Add to this that afaict, the Arduino framework API currently doesn't provide fantastic abstractions for power/state management either. I had an Arduino-based esp32 project once and extracting best deep sleep performance definitely required reaching lower into ESP-IDF API instead (e.g. the difference between ext0 and ext1 wakeups and being able to shut off RTC memory in one but not the other). That means with the current framework, you have to potentially write non-portable code between two different versions of the "same Uno R4" if you want to optimize for low power. All of embedded is like this, really - scanning through and understanding a product line is basically a required skill - but meh, what a mess for beginners.
  - nfriedly 4y ago
    I could be wrong, but my reading of the post was that the Wi-Fi version has two MCUs - the main RA4M1, and the S3 WiFi module. So, if you turn off wi-fi, they should be effectively the same board.
- wombat_trouble 4y ago
  I'd wager that 99% of Arduino enthusiasts (and a good percentage of industrial hw engineers...) do not have a habit of using power save modes on bare metal.
mNovak 4y ago
I agree, considering that much of their marketing surrounds DIY automation and they have this whole IoT cloud platform now, they very little support for low-power operation. In this regard I think Adafuit and Seeed platforms do much better, while still being very beginner friendly.

microtonal 4y ago

These boards confuse me so much. The microcontroller is a Renesas RA4M1 running at 48MHz. However, the Wifi version uses an Espressif S3 module. However the S3 is a dual core microcontroller that runs up to 240 MHz. Why not base the board on that, or perhaps even the RISC-V version of ESP32? ESP32 has plenty of pins, deep sleep, etc. Is it only to keep pinout/5V compatibility with older Unos? I think their bigger problem is that there are a lot of good competitors now and their boards are severely overpriced for what they offer.

asddubs 4y ago
if they weren't going to keep compatibility, there would be no point in going with the same form factor (and they could fix the awkward spacing that one of the headers has) - this is meant as something that will work with the various shields that are available.
leokeba 4y ago
Exactly my thought, this seems like a bunch of design compromises mostly towards backwards-compatibility, but I suspect they also did not want to make their flagship product reliant on a chinese MCU, hence the no-wifi variant.
0xDEF 4y ago
A low-power ARM MCU like that can run for years. There are wireless sensors based on TI's wireless ARM Cortex-M3 solutions that can run for years before needing a battery replacement.
- microtonal 4y ago
  The Renesas uses 5µA/11.4µA with peripheral clocks disabled/enabled. The ESP32 2.5µA/10µA respectively. So it does even slightly better.

dale_glass 4y ago

A nice improvement, but maybe too little too late? I mean, what's the point? An ESP32 has 320K SRAM, 448K Flash and a 240 MHz dual core CPU. And it costs peanuts. That's the competition to beat, and this doesn't reach it, even though the ESP32 came out in 2016. The Arduino has been resting on its laurels for too long, I'm afraid. There's long been things out there much faster and cheaper, and with wifi out there for a long time. EDIT: And why not just use one of these, which is already for sale? https://freematics.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=59 https://freematics.com/store/index.php?route=product/product...

okl 4y ago
I'm not into Arduinos but I think they are not selling their products because they have the largest RAM or the fastest CPU but because of the Arduino IDE, the language and the community.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  The ESP32 can be programmed through the Arduino IDE, using the exact same language. I've done that. Now the ESP32 as usually delivered is not pin or voltage compatible, but surely that's not that hard of a problem. Just make an Arduino shaped board for it, and use a level shifter? In fact this very thing seems to exist: https://freematics.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=59 https://freematics.com/store/index.php?route=product/product...
  - ta988 4y ago
    So now you need to add a level shifer increase the number of mistakes and the risk of ruining your board. Your solution makes life of hobbyists less enjoyable IMHO. The GPIO are not level shifted in the board you link.
    - dale_glass 4y ago
      Maybe that's not the right board, but a level shifter is what, $1 or so? Could be on the board itself easily.

numpad0 4y ago

Should I feel relieved that the main chip is not carrying scary prefixes and suffixes like CXD, APQ, uPD, MB, etc., or be absolutely horrified still that it’s a Renesas built ARM?

okl 4y ago
If you take a look at the Renesas website, you'll find that the product names look like this: "R7FA4M1AB3CFL#HA0". Renesas has a larger portfolio including, e.g., RISC-V chips. What's the problem?
- numpad0 4y ago
  The pain. Of messing with Japanese traditional companies.
  - dark-star 4y ago
    can you elaborate? I have used plenty of Renesas-powered devices in the past and didn't have any problems...

stratosgear 4y ago

Why are parts of the board covered, in their photo? Which parts are under there?

qwery 4y ago
Don't know, but it certainly jumped out at me. All I could think of was that some part of the design isn't finalised and/or hiding part of it (or an identifying mark?) in an attempt to delay the counterfeiters.

timmaxw 4y ago

The Uno is one of the best boards for beginners due to its huge ecosystem of tutorials, accessories, etc. But for a long time the Uno was stuck on the same 8-bit core for backwards-compatibility reasons, even as alternative boards offered much better specs. If the R4 can offer better specs without fragmenting the ecosystem, it will be a winner for beginners IMO.

josephcsible 4y ago

IMO, this is so different from the three previous UNOs that they should have made up a new name for it instead of calling it an UNO.

AviationAtom 4y ago
DOS?
- josephcsible 4y ago
  They're Italian, so they'd say "due" instead of "dos", which they've already used: https://docs.arduino.cc/hardware/due https://docs.arduino.cc/hardware/due Ditto for "tre": https://docs.arduino.cc/retired/boards/arduino-tre https://docs.arduino.cc/retired/boards/arduino-tre It looks like they haven't used "quattro" themselves, but a popular Arduino-based robotics project has, so using it for a new board would be confusing. They've used "cinque" too: https://hackaday.com/2017/05/20/arduino-cinque-the-risc-v-esp32-wifi-bluetooth-arduino/ https://hackaday.com/2017/05/20/arduino-cinque-the-risc-v-es... "Sei" isn't used, but it'd cause confusion when people search for how to enable interrupts on Arduinos. So I think "sette" would be the next good candidate if they wanted to name it after a number.
  - AviationAtom 4y ago
    Fair point. My thought process tends to be a bit more biased towards the Espanol than the Italiano.

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tiedieconderoga 4y ago

At first I thought it was really strange that they chose a slow Renesas MCU, while also including an ESP32 module. Arduino has always been priced at an extreme premium which they justified by publishing easy-to-use software libraries, though. Maybe it's good that we'll have a widely-supported hobby board that uses something besides Microchip/ST/Espressif. Maybe with a more diverse ecosystem, we could see a decent vendor-agnostic HAL someday.

ohazi 4y ago

What's up with the yellow rectangle?

inamberclad 4y ago
Caught my eye too. Looks like they're hiding part of the board design?
- numpad0 4y ago
  From the link: > The board provides a CAN bus, which allows users to minimize wiring and execute different tasks in parallel by connecting multiple shields. From [0]: > The Renesas RA4M1 group of micrcontrollers (MCUs) uses the high-performance Arm® Cortex®-M4 core and offers a segment LCD controller and a capacitive touch sensing unit input for intensive HMI designs. Maybe a CAN bus connector, or finally a builtin user interface, if it's not just a power circuit? Built-in LCD/OLED, buttons, basic shell casing and end-user usable expansion connectors are growing trends among China/Shenzhen originating platforms like M5Stack. Arduino is still relying on hacky solutions for UI, which might be less appealing for casual users. 0: https://www.renesas.com/us/en/products/microcontrollers-microprocessors/ra-cortex-m-mcus/ra4m1-32-bit-microcontrollers-48mhz-arm-cortex-m4-and-lcd-controller-and-cap-touch-hmi https://www.renesas.com/us/en/products/microcontrollers-micr...

qwertox 4y ago

How popular are Arduinos nowadays? I've used them years ago and they were great, they taught me about how to program and use the ATMegas and generally how to program close to hardware. But then the Raspberry Pis came along and showed me how useful more processing power is, and for the microcontroller stuff the ESP8266 and then the ESP32 showed me that having WiFi directly on the MCU is so much better than just an Arduino, for which I used to buy really long cables. There was a time when I then paired Arduinos with ESP8266 in order to integrate them into the network, but since the ESP32 I've never looked back. And yet I see new Arduinos being offered and just wonder who is buying them nowadays. Since I haven't informed myself for years on them, maybe I'm really missing out on something?

kennywinker 4y ago
Depends on what you're building. Raspberry Pi's are hard to obtain, much more expensive, overkill for tons of tasks, and involve learning or already knowing a bunch of linux / sysadmin knowledge. In my experience, arduinos get picked over ESP32s mostly because someone's already done what you want with an arduino so you can leverage existing code/projects. Not every project needs wifi, or 240mhz, or 32bits. And in those cases, the beaten path is the best choice. That said, yeah, esp32 gets picked a lot even when the wifi isn't needed, because it's starting to be the beaten path.

Yoofie 4y ago

I found it strange that they are using a ARM Renesas chip instead of your more well known brands such as ST Micro, NXP or Microchip. Renesas was fairly late on using ARM cores compared to the rest of the industry. Then I read the comment on CNX-Software. Renesas has invested 10 million dollar to Arduino. [1]. Now it makes sense. Gotta follow the money. [1]: https://www.renesas.com/us/en/about/press-room/renesas-announces-investment-popular-open-source-company-arduino-access-huge-developer-community https://www.renesas.com/us/en/about/press-room/renesas-annou...

Dalewyn 4y ago
It's kind of telling that Renesas, which combined the semiconductor businesses of NEC, Hitachi, and Mitsubishi, isn't a "well known brand". Ouch, that burn is bloody epic.
- numpad0 4y ago
  It’s their ARM chip that isn’t well known. The company itself is, kind of. Think of a Sukhoi civilian jet next to a line of fighter jets carrying both Su and MiG prefixes.

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hd95489 4y ago

More power but still no rtc on the baseline. The 12 bit dac is an improvement for pulse width modulation. Though I’ll be honest I think most people use these for smart switches and power modulation devices so better dac is nice.

spiritplumber 4y ago

For industrial stuff I tend to use the Parallax Propeller. It was ahead of its time when it came out, it still holds its own well (and the propeller 2 is a beast) and it can take a beating electrically.

97s 4y ago

I know a lot of people above don't think it means much, but I built a machine from scratch(for my business equipment) with no knowledge of any of this stuff using Arduino and it was one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever had. There is something to be said about making hardware and software interface so easy like they have done. I would have never achieved this in the 3 month period as quickly as I did without Arduino. Super excited for this new Uno.

benbojangles 4y ago

do the pinouts become 3.3v instead of arduino uno 5v?

far_focus 4y ago

I received an Arduino Uno starter kit from my grandfather many many years ago on my birthday; it got me started coding before I even realized I was coding. I don't even think I was a teenager? Only years later when I took my first programming course at college, did I realize :) Glad to see the original uno hardware updated -- I distinctly remember running out of flash memory, because I copied and pasted the blinking LED code hundreds and hundreds of times. I didn't know about for or while loops !

ur-whale 4y ago

The specs are rather underwhelming in 2023. While the Uno was a revolution in many regards, this very much feels like a weak attempt at catching up to an ESP32 board. Not sure why I would ever want to buy one of these given what already exists out there.