New Arduino Yún is based on Atmel’s ATMega32u4 microcontroller

Arduino’s Massimo Banzi has debuted the Yún at Silicon Valley Maker Faire 2013. The new board – designed in collaboration with Dog Hunter – is based on Atmel’s ATMega32u4 microcontroller and also features the Atheros AR9331, an SoC running Linino, a customized version of OpenWRT.

According to an Arduino rep, the Yún will make it easy for makers to connect to complex web services directly from Arduino.

“Historically, interfacing Arduino with complex web services has been quite a challenge due to the limited memory available. [Plus], they tend to use verbose text based formats like XML that require quite a lot or RAM to parse,” the rep explained in a blog post.

“On the Arduino Yún we have created the Bridge library which delegates all network connections and processing of HTTP transactions to the Linux machine.”

Essentially, the Yún can best be described as a combination of the classic Arduino Leonardo (based on Atmel’s Atmega32U4 processor) with a WiFi system-on-a-chip running Linino (a MIPS GNU/Linux based on OpenWRT). Like a Leonardo, the board boasts 14 digital input/output pins (of which 7 can be used as PWM outputs and 12 as analog inputs), a 16 MHz crystal oscillator and a micro USB connector. The Wi-Fi enabled Yún is equipped with a standard-A type USB and a micro-SD card plug for additional storage.

As expected, the Yún ATMega32u4 can be programmed as a standard Arduino board by linking it to a PC with the micro USB connector – and can also be programmed via WiFi as well as reached with SSH.

“Using the Bridge library in your sketches, you can link the 32u4 to Linux, launching programs and scripts, passing them parameters (sensor readings for example) and reading their output, thus creating a strong integration between the creativity of your sketch and the power of Linux.The Yún supports Shell and Python scripts out-of-the-box but you can install a wide range of open source software and tools,” the rep continued.

“To make it even simpler to create complex applications we’ve partnered with Temboo which provides normalized access to 100+ APIs from a single point of contact allowing developers to mix and match data coming from multiple platforms, [including] Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and even FedEx or PayPal.”

The Arduino Yún will be available at the end of June at a $69 price point.