Atmel’s SAM L21 MCU for IoT tops low power benchmark

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SAM L21 MCUs consume less than 940nA with full 40kB SRAM retention, real-time clock and calendar, and 200nA in the deepest sleep mode.

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The Internet of Things (IoT) juggernaut has unleashed a flurry of low-power microcontrollers, and in that array of energy-efficient MCUs, one product has earned the crown jewel of being the lowest-power Cortex M-based solution with power consumption down to 35µA/MHz in active mode and 200nA in sleep mode.

How do we know if Atmel’s SAM L21 microcontroller can actually claim the leadership in ultra-low-power processing movement? The answer lies in the EEMBC ULPBench power benchmark that was introduced last year. It ensures a level playing field in executing the benchmark by having the MCU perform 20,000 clock cycles of active work once a second and sleep the remainder of the second.

 

ULPBench shows SAM L21 is lower power than any of its competitor’s M0+ class chips.

Atmel has released the ultra-low-power SAM L21 MCU it demonstrated at Electronica in Munich, Germany back in November 2014. Architectural innovations in the SAM L21 MCU family enable low-power peripherals — including timers, serial communications and capacitive touch sensing — to remain powered and running while the rest of the system is in a reduced power mode. That further reduces power consumption for always-on applications such as fire alarms, healthcare, medical and connected wearables.

Next, the 32-bit ARM-based MCU portfolio combines ultra-low-power with Flash and SRAM that are large enough to run both the application and wireless stacks. Collectively, these three features make up the basic recipe for battery-powered mobile and IoT devices for extending their battery life from years to decades. Moreover, they reduce the number of times batteries need to be changed in a plethora of IoT applications.

Low Power Leap of Faith

Atmel’s SAM L21 microcontrollers have achieved a staggering 185.8 ULPBench score, which is way ahead of runner-up TI’s SimpleLink C26xx microcontroller family that scored 143.6. The SAM L21 microcontrollers consume less than 940nA with full 40kB SRAM retention, real-time clock and calendar, and 200nA in the deepest sleep mode. According to Atmel spokesperson, it comes down to one-third the power of competing solutions.

Markus Levy, President and Founder of EEMBC, credits Atmel’s low-power feat to its proprietary picoPower technology and the company’s low-power expertise in utilizing DC-DC conversion for voltage monitoring. Atmel’s picoPower technology employs flexible clocking options and short wake-up time with multiple wake-up sources from even the deepest sleep modes.

ULPBench aims to provide developers with a reliable methodology to test MCUs.

In other words, Atmel has taken the low-power game beyond architectural improvements to the CPU while optimizing nearly every peripheral to operate in standalone mode and then use a minimum number of transistors to complete the given task. Most lower-power ARM chips simply disable the clock to various parts of the device. The SAM L21 microcontroller, on the other hand, turns off power to those chip parts; hence, there is no leakage current in thousands of transistors in that part.

Here is a brief highlight of Atmel’s low-power development efforts that now encompass almost every peripheral in an MCU device:

Sleep Modes

Sleep modes not only gate away the clock signal to stop switching consumption, but also remove the power from sub-domains to fully eliminate leakage. Atmel also employs SRAM back-biasing to reduce leakage in sleep modes.

Consider a simple application where the temperature in a room is monitored using a temperature sensor with the analog-to-digital converter (ADC). In order to reduce the power consumption, the CPU would be put to sleep and wake up periodically on interrupts from a real-time counter (RTC). The measured sensor data is checked against a predefined threshold to decide on further action. If the data does not exceed the threshold, the CPU will be put back to sleep waiting for the next RTC interrupt.

SleepWalking

SleepWalking is a technology that enables peripherals to request a clock when needed to wake-up from sleep modes and perform tasks without having to power up the CPU Flash and other support systems. For instance, Atmel’s ultra-low-power capacitive touch-sensing peripheral can run in all operating modes and supports wake-up on a touch.

For the temperature monitoring application, as mentioned above, this means that the ADC’s peripheral clock will only be running when the ADC is converting. When the ADC receives the overflow event from the RTC, it will request its generic clock from the generic clock controller and peripheral clock will stop as soon as the ADC conversion is completed.

Event System

The Event System allows peripherals to communicate directly without involving the CPU and thus enables peripherals to work together to solve complex tasks using minimal gates. It allows system developers to chain events in software and use an event to trigger a peripheral without CPU involvement.

Again, taking temperature monitor as a use case, the RTC must be set to generate an overflow event, which is routed to the ADC by configuring the Event System. The ADC must be configured to start a conversion when it receives an event. By using the Event System, an RTC overflow can trigger an ADC conversion without waking up the CPU. Moreover, the ADC can be configured to generate an interrupt if the threshold is exceeded, and the interrupt will wake up the CPU.

Low Power MCU Use Case

Paul Rako has mentioned a sensor monitor in his recent post in Atmel’s Bits & Pieces blog. Rako writes in his post titled “The SAM L21 pushes the boundaries of low power MCUs” about this sensor monitor being asleep 99.99 percent of the time, waking up once a day to take a measurement and send it wirelessly to a host. Such tasks can be conveniently handled by an 8-bit device.

However, moving to IoT applications, which constitute protocol stacks, there is number crunching involved and that requires a faster ARM-class 32-bit chip. So, for battery-powered IoT applications, Rako makes the case for 32-bit ARM-based chip that can wake up, do its thing, and go back to sleep. If a high-current chip wakes up 10 times faster but uses twice the power, it will still use less energy and less charge than the slower chip.

Next, Rako presents sensor fusion hub as a case study in which the device saves power by skipping the radio chip to send the data from each sensor and instead uses the ARM-based microcontroller that does the math and pre-processing to combine the raw data from all sensors and then assembles the result as a simple chunk of data.

Atmel has scored an important design victory in the ongoing low-power game that is now prevalent in the rapidly expanding IoT market. Atmel already boasts credentials in the connectivity and security domains — the other two key IoT building blocks. Its connectivity solutions cover multiple wireless arenas — Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Zigbee and 6LoWPan — to enable IoT communications.

Likewise, Atmel’s CryptoAuthentication devices come with protected hardware key storage and are available with SHA256, AES128 or ECC256/283 cryptography. The IoT triumvirate of low power consumption, broad connectivity portfolio and crypto engineering puts Atmel in a strong position in the promising new market of IoT that is increasingly demanding low power portfolio of MCUs to be matched with high performance.

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Majeed Ahmad is author of books Smartphone: Mobile Revolution at the Crossroads of Communications, Computing and Consumer Electronics and The Next Web of 50 Billion Devices: Mobile Internet’s Past, Present and Future.

Ars Technica, Daily Mail and other media talk SAM L21

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The new Atmel | SMART L21 is expanding battery life from years to decades. 

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This week, Atmel revealed the big news that the recently-unveiled Atmel | SMART SAM L family consumes just one-third the power of existing solutions already on the market. Having achieved a 185 EEMBC ULPBench score, the SAM L21 is now the world’s lowest power ARM Cortex-M based device.

Impressively, the series boasts power consumption down to 35µA/MHz in active mode and 200nA in sleep mode. The SAM L not only broadens the company’s current 32-bit ARM-based MCU lineup, but extends battery life from years to decades, reducing the number of times batteries need to be changed in devices such as fire alarms, wearables, medical gadgets and equipment placed in rural, agriculture, offshore and other remote areas. The SAM L21 combines ultra-low power with Flash and SRAM that are large enough to run both the application and wireless stacks — three features that are cornerstones of most Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Sampling now, the SAM L21 comes complete with a development platform including an Xplained Pro kit, code libraries and Atmel Studio support.

The SAM L21 MCUs will enable designers to solve their power challenges for battery-powered IoT devices — something that has caught the attention of mainstream media outlets including Ars Technica, Gizmodo, The Register, Network World and Daily Mail, as well as industry journals like Silicon Republic, New Electronics and EE Times.

 Sean Gallagher, Ars Technica 

“The number of things getting plugged into the Internet of Things has already reached the point of satire. But there’s a new, extremely low power technology that’s being prepared for market that could put computing power and network access into a whole new class of sensors, wearables, and practically disposable devices. That’s because it can run off a battery charge for over over 10 years.”

“The processor may not be enough to, say, run an Ubuntu desktop, but it’s certainly enough computing power and memory to run a real-time operating system with multiple programs, handle physical interfaces, stream media from a USB device or other external storage, and tweet you when your dishes are clean. It also can handle a lot of tasks that can reduce the power usage of other components in a device.”

Victoria Woollaston, Daily Mail 

“Battery life is consistently listed as a major flaw of smartphones, smartwatches and other wearables.  But this problem could soon be solved thanks to technology that promises to extend battery life for ‘decades.’ Atmel has released its latest microcontrollers (MCUs) for a variety of gadgets that are so low power they can even harvest energy from a person’s body.”

“They use a third of the power of rival chips and tests have shown they are the lowest power microprocessor ever made. The microcontrollers run on the firm’s picoPower technology and Atmel’s Event System that makes different parts of the device work together to carry out tasks. By effectively ‘sharing’ energy, the whole device uses less power and, subsequently, less battery.”

Jamie Condliffe, Gizmodo

“As everything around us, from phones and fridges to bicycles and trash cans, begins to connect to the Internet, there’s an increasing desire for low-power chips. Like this one, which can last for over ten years on a single battery charge. It has some other clever tricks up its sleeve. Usually in a chip like this, sleep mode sees everything but the clock function shut down, meaning it has to wake every time connected devices need to communicate; this new Atmel chip has different sleep states, allowing connected devices to communicate with each other while the chip continues to use very little power.”

“Of course, the chips don’t pack huge amounts of grunt. In fact, at best you’re looking at a 42 MHz Cortex M0+ CPU core, 256 kilobytes of Flash memory, 32 kilobytes of static RAM, and 8 kb of separate low-power static RAM. Not enough to run a desktop OS, then, but plenty to run small programs, power hardware interfaces, read and record data from sensors, tweet and the like.”

JC Torres, SlashGear

“Batteries, already the Achilles heel of mobile devices, present an even bigger challenge for even smaller devices, like wearables and the budding Internet of Things industry. These latter devices are not things that you would, or should, associate with the frequent charging and battery replacement we are used to on smartphones. How do you balance performance and battery life? Atmel, a micro-controller manufacturer based in San Jose, may have the answer. Its new ultra-low power SAM L21 32-bit ARM-based MCU (micro controller unit) is advertised to last more than a decade before needing a recharge or replacement.”

“That kind of battery life will be critical for a certain class of devices that include sensors, wearable, and smart home appliances. The SAM L21 advertises a power draw of only 35 microamps per MHz when awake and an even smaller 200 nanoamps when asleep. In comparison, current low-power MCUs already eat up to 120 to 160 microamps per MHz. The difference it definitely substantial.”

Patrick Nelson, Network World

“The Internet of Things is about to reverse a lot of what we’ve wanted in a chip. Soon, we won’t need vast amounts of calculations per second — just how many instructions does it take for your fridge to send an order to your supermarket? Not that many when you compare it to something complicated that chip design has been working towards, like a Computer Aided Design drawing in 3D, for example.”

“Size is important. However, the real big issue, when it comes to a ubiquitous IoT where everything is connected, will be battery life. The reason is that we are not going to want to change the batteries within the base of a dozen bottles of water that we may have sitting around just to discover whether we’ve drank their contents or not. Even if your fridge orders fresh stock, it wouldn’t be worth it.”

“That battery has to last the life of the connected object in the IoT. And that could be 10 years away, possibly longer. Atmel reckons it has a solution. It says its new 32-bit ARM-based chips will last decades. Note the plural. Atmel says its new chips combine battery-saving low power with flash and SRAM that is big enough to run both the application and the IoT-needed wireless stacks.”

Shaun Nichols, The Register

“Being a Cortex-M0+-powered chip, the SAM L21 is not particularly powerful: it tops out at 48MHz, and runs ARM Thumb (and some Thumb-2) code. But the family does pack a few features like USB interfacing, op-amps and comparators, DMA with peripherals, a random number generator, and AES cryptography in hardware, plus other bits and pieces. The idea is for each chip to sleep, wake up when something happens, make a decision on whether or not it needs to alert the wider world, and then go back to sleep.

“Constantly being in contact with its base over wired or wireless networking will drain its batteries; activating external electronics for power-hungry IP communications should only be done if its sensors detect something significant. Like an explosion or a fire.”

Gordon Hunt, Silicon Republic

“Sensors and batteries – the two keys to unlocking the future of IoT. Can we make small enough sensors to garner and exchange the right data? Can we make small enough, powerful enough, batteries that don’t need recharging every few hours?These are the two questions posed for today’s inventors, and they are being answered every day. Now, Atmel’s latest creation may have brought significant IoT engagement closer to reality, with its new low-powered 32-bit SAM L controller able extend the battery life of small, low-powered intelligent devices by decades.”

“The result is a far more efficient, small controller that, if advanced upon in the right way, will open up a whole new swathe of devices for IoT innovation. It’s just a sample, prototype release so far, but once the right people get their hands on this it’s only a matter of time before it creeps into suites of low-powered devices.”

Rich Quinnell, EE Times

“This week TI surpassed its own earlier result by announcing the MSP-432 family based on the Cortex M4F. It achieved a ULPBench score of 167.4. While TI was briefing the media on this product, however, Atmel quietly published a ULPBench score of 185.8 for its SAM L21 MCU based on the Cortex M0+, a product announced last year that was scheduled to be released at about this time. It’s reasonable to expect that a formal announcement of the product’s score and availability will be made soon.”

Clive Maxfield, Embedded

“When it comes to applications including the Internet of Things (IoT), consumer, industrial, medical, and other battery-powered devices — e.g., fire alarms, healthcare, medical, wearable, and devices placed in rural, agriculture, offshore, and other remote areas — ultra-low-power consumption is the name of the game. MCU manufacturers are constantly competing with each other to offer the lowest power consumption possible. The latest ultra-low-power offering comes from the folks at Atmel, who have just announced their SMART SAM L21 — an ARM Cortex-M0+ based family of MCUs that boast power consumption down to 35µA/MHz in active mode and 200nA in sleep mode — which is said to ‘extend battery life from years to decades.’”

“The L21 goes much further than simply gating the clocks — it also gates the power, completely disconnecting the power rails from functions that are not currently in use. In the case of the smart peripherals, even when they are powered down, a small part of each peripheral keeps a ‘watchful eye’ on what’s happening in the outside world. If it sees something interesting, it can request clock and data services and — if the peripheral decides the situation justifies such an action — it can wake the main CPU… Also of interest is the CCL (custom configurable logic) block, which boasts four 3-input lookup tables (LUTs) that can implement a mix of combinatorial logic functions (AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR, XNOR, NOT) and sequential logic functions (gates D-type flip-flop, JK-type flip-flop, gated D-type latch, RS latch). These can be connected to the event system (including the peripherals), the interrupt system, and general-purpose input/outputs; also, they can be cascaded together. This makes it possible to implement sophisticated customized “wake-up” conditions for the various functional blocks.”

Interested learning more? You can head over to our initial blog post on the topic, download its accompanying white paper, as well as delve deeper into the MCU lineup here.

SAM L family now the world’s lowest power ARM Cortex-M based solution

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Consuming one-third the power of existing solutions, Atmel | SMART SAM L achieves 185 EEMBC ULPBench score.

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System design used to be an exercise in optimizing speed. That has since changed. Nowadays, embedded systems pack plenty of performance to handle a number of task, leading the challenge for designers to shift to completing those tasks using as little energy as possible — but not necessarily making it as fast as possible. As you can imagine, this has created quite the competitive environment on the processor battlefield amongst vendors, each seeking to attain the lowest power solution on the market.

“The surge in popularity of battery-powered electronics has made battery life a primary system-design consideration. In extreme cases, the desire is not to run off of a battery at all, but to harvest energy from local sources to run a system — which requires the utmost power frugality,” writes Andreas Eieland, Atmel Director of Product Marketing. “In addition, there’s a growing family of devices like smoke detectors, door locks, and industrial sensors (4-20 mA and 10-50 mA) that can draw power through their inputs, and that power is limited.”

These sort of trends point to the significance of reducing the power requirements of electronic systems. However, the varying technologies that provide the necessary performance make power reduction harder. Fortunately, Atmel has been focusing on low power consumption for more than 10 years across its portfolio of AVR and Atmel ǀ SMART ARM-based processors. Many integrated peripherals and design techniques are used to minimize power consumption in real-world applications, such as integrated hardware DMA and event system to offload the CPU in active and standby modes, switching off or reducing clock or supply on device portions not in use, intelligent SleepWalking peripherals enabling CPU to remain in deep sleep longer, fast wake-up from low power modes, low voltage operation with full functionality, as well as careful balancing of high performance and low leakage transistors in the MCU design.

With picoPower technology found in AVR and Atmel ǀ SMART MCUs, Atmel has taken it a step further. Indeed, all picoPower devices are designed from the ground up for lowest possible power consumption from transistor design and process geometry, sleep modes, flexible clocking options, to intelligent peripherals. Atmel picoPower devices can operate down to 1.62V while still maintaining all functionality, including analog functions. They have short wake-up times, with multiple wake-up sources from even the deepest sleep modes. Some elements of picoPower technology cannot be directly manipulated by the user, but they form a solid base that enables ultra-low power application development without compromising functionality. Meanwhile, flexible and powerful features and peripherals lets users apply an assortment of techniques to reduce a system’s total power consumption even further.

Then, there’s the Atmel | SMART SAM L21 microcontroller, which has broken all ultra-low power performance barriers to date. These Cortex-M0+-based MCUs can maintain system functionality, all while consuming just one-third the power of comparable products on the market today. This device delivers ultra-low power running down to 35µA/MHz in active mode, consuming less than 900nA with full 32kB RAM retention. With rapid wake-up times, Event System, Sleepwalking and the innovative picoPower peripherals, the SAM L21 is ideal for handheld and battery-operated devices for a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

The ultra-low power SAM L family not only broadens the Atmel | SMART portfolio, but extends battery life from years to decades, reducing the number of times batteries need to be changed in devices such as fire alarms, healthcare, medical, wearable, and equipment placed in rural, agriculture, offshore and other remote areas. The SAM L21 combines ultra-low power with Flash and SRAM that are large enough to run both the application and wireless stacks — three features that are cornerstones of most IoT applications. Sampling now, the SAM L21 comes complete with a development platform including an Xplained Pro kit, code libraries and Atmel Studio support.

So how does the SAM L21 stack up against the others? Ahead of the pack, of course! As an alternative to so-called “bench marketing” of low power products, nearly ever large semiconductor company — and several smaller ones that focus on low power — have collaborated in a working group formed by the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC). The EEMBC ULPBench uses standardized test measurement hardware to strictly define a benchmark code for use by vendors, considering energy efficiency and running on 8-, 16- and 32-bit architectures. At the moment, the Atmel | SMART SAM L21 product boasts the highest ULPBench score of any microcontroller, regardless of CPU.

“In Atmel’s announcement last year for the company’s SAM L21 family, I had pointed out the amazingly low current consumption ratings for both the active and sleep mode operation of this product family – now I can confirm this opinion with concrete data derived from the EEMBC ULPBench,” explained Markus Levy, EEMBC President and Founder. “Atmel achieved the lowest power of any Cortex-M based processor and MCU in the world because of its patented ultra-low power picoPower technology. These ULPBench results are remarkable, demonstrating the company’s low-power expertise utilizing DC-DC conversion for voltage monitoring, as well as other innovative techniques.”

While running the EEMBC ULPBench, the SAM L21 achieves a staggering score of 185, the highest publicly-recorded score for any Cortex-M based processor or MCU in the world — and significantly higher than the 167 and 123 scores announced by other vendors. The SAM L21 family consumes less than 940nA with full 40kB SRAM retention, real-time clock and calendar and 200nA in the deepest sleep mode.

In fact, a recent EE Times writeup delving deeper into competition even revealed, “TI surpassed its own earlier result by announcing the MSP-432 family based on the Cortex M4F. It achieved a ULPBench score of 167.4. While TI was briefing the media on this product, however, Atmel quietly published a ULPBench score of 185.8 for its SAM L21 MCU based on the Cortex M0+.”

Beyond the recently-unveiled ARM-based chip, it’s also important to note the 0.7V tinyAVR. A typical microcontroller requires at least 1.8V to operate, while the voltage of a single battery-cell typically ranges from 1.2V to 1.5V when fully charged, and then drops gradually below 1V during use, still holding a reasonable amount of charge. This means a regular MCU needs at least two battery cells. Whereas, Atmel has solved this problem by integrating a boost converter inside the ATtiny43U, converting a DC voltage to a higher level, and bridging the gap between minimum supply voltage of the MCU and the typical output voltages of a standard single cell battery. The boost converter provides the chip with a fixed supply voltage of 3.0V from a single battery cell even when the battery voltage drops down to 0.7V. This allows non-rechargeable batteries to be drained to the minimum, thereby extending the battery life. Programmable shut-off levels above the critical minimum voltage level avoid damaging the battery cell of rechargeable batteries.

Interested in learning more? You can explore Atmel’s low power technology here, as well as download the new white paper entitled “Turn Power-Reducing Features into Low-Power Systems” here.

Which Arduino board is right for you?

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Picking an Arduino is as easy as Uno, Due, Tre! 

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Thinking about starting a project? See which Arduino board is right for the job.

Arduino Uno

This popular board — based on the ATmega328 MCU — features 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a 16 MHz ceramic resonator, USB connection, power jack, an ICSP header and a reset button.

The Uno does not use the FTDI USB-to-serial driver chip. Instead, it features the ATmega16U2 (ATmega8U2 up to version R2) programmed as a USB-to-serial converter.

In addition, Revision 3 of the Uno offers the following new features:

• 
1.0 pinout: added SDA and SCL pins that are near to the AREF pin and two other new pins placed near to the RESET pin, the IOREF that allow the shields to adapt to the voltage provided from the board. Note: The second is not a connected pin.
• 
Stronger RESET circuit.
• ATmega16U2 replace the 8U2.

Arduino Leonardo

The Arduino Leonardo is built around the versatile ATmega32U4. This board offers 20 digital input/output pins (of which 7 can be used as PWM outputs and 12 as analog inputs), a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, microUSB connection, power jack, an ICSP header and a reset button.

The Leonardo contains everything needed to support the microcontroller; simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable or power it with a AC-to-DC adapter or battery to get started. Plus, the ATmega32U4 offers built-in USB communication, eliminating the need for a secondary processor. This allows it to appear as a mouse and keyboard, in addition to being recognized as a virtual (CDC) serial / COM port.

Arduino Due

The Arduino Due is an MCU board based on the Atmel | SMART SAM3X8E ARM Cortex-M3 CPU.

As the first Arduino built on a 32-bit ARM core microcontroller, Due boasts 54 digital input/output pins (of which 12 can be used as PWM outputs), 12 analog inputs, 4 UARTs (hardware serial ports), an 84 MHz clock, USB OTG capable connection, 2 DAC (digital to analog), 2 TWI, a power jack, an SPI header, a JTAG header, a reset button and an erase button.

Unlike other Arduino boards, the Due runs at 3.3V. The maximum voltage that the I/O pins can tolerate is 3.3V. Providing higher voltages, like 5V to an I/O pin, could damage the board.

Arduino Yún

The Arduino Yún features an ATmega32U4, along with an Atheros AR9331 that supports a Linux distribution based on OpenWRT known as Linino.

The Yún has built-in Ethernet and Wi-Fi support, a USB-A port, a microSD card slot, 20 digital input/output pins (of which 7 can be used as PWM outputs and 12 as analog inputs), a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, microUSB connection, an ICSP header and 3 reset buttons. The Yún is also capable of communicating with the Linux distribution onboard, offering a powerful networked computer with the ease of Arduino.

In addition to Linux commands like cURL, Makers and engineers can write their own shell and python scripts for robust interactions. The Yún is similar to the Leonardo in that the ATmega32U4 offers USB communication, eliminating the need for a secondary processor. This enables the Yún to appear as a mouse and keyboard, in addition to being recognized as a virtual (CDC) serial?COM port.

Arduino Micro

Developed in conjunction with Adafruit, the Arduino Micro is powered by ATmega32U4.

The board is equipped 20 digital input/output pins (of which 7 can be used as PWM outputs and 12 as analog inputs), a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, microUSB connection, a ICSP header and a reset button. The Micro includes everything needed to support the microcontroller; simply connect it to a computer with a microUSB cable to get started. The Micro even has a form factor that lets the device be easily placed on a breadboard.

Arduino Robot

The Arduino Robot is the very first official Arduino on wheels. The robot is equipped with two processors — one for each of its two boards.

The motor board drives the motors, while the control board is tasked with reading sensors and determining how to operate. Each of the ATmega32u4 based units are fully-programmable using the Arduino IDE. More specifically, configuring the robot is similar to the process with the Arduino Leonardo, as both MCUs offer built-in USB communication, effectively eliminating the need for a secondary processor. This enables the Robot to appear to a connected computer as a virtual (CDC) serial?COM port.

Arduino Esplora

The Arduino Esplora is an ATmega32u4 powered microcontroller board derived from the Arduino Leonardo. It’s designed for Makers and DIY hobbyists who want to get up and running with Arduino without having to learn about the electronics first.

The Esplora features onboard sound and light outputs, along with several input sensors, including a joystick, slider, temperature sensor, accelerometer, microphone and a light sensor. It also has the potential to expand its capabilities with two Tinkerkit input and output connectors, along with a socket for a color TFT LCD screen.

Arduino Mega (2560)

The Arduino Mega features an ATmega2560 at its heart.

It is packed with 54 digital input/output pins (of which 15 can be used as PWM outputs), 16 analog inputs, 4 UARTs (hardware serial ports), a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header and a reset button. Simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable or power it with a AC-to-DC adapter or battery to get started. The Mega is compatible with most shields designed for the Arduino Duemilanove or Diecimila.

Arduino Mini

Originally based on the ATmega168, and now equipped with the ATmega328, the Arduino Mini is intended for use on breadboards and projects where space is at a premium.

The board is loaded with 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 8 analog inputs and a 16 MHz crystal oscillator. It can be programmed with the USB Serial adapter, the other USB, or the RS232 to TTL serial adapter.

Arduino LilyPad

The LilyPad Arduino is designed specifically for wearables and e-textiles. It can be sewn to fabric and similarly mounted power supplies, sensors and actuators with conductive thread.

The board is based on the ATmega168V (the low-power version of the ATmega168) or the ATmega328V. The LilyPad Arduino was designed and developed by Leah Buechley and SparkFun Electronics. Readers may also want to check out the LilyPad Simple, LilyPad USB and the LilyPad SimpleSnap.

Arduino Nano

The Arduino Nano is a tiny, complete and breadboard-friendly board based on the ATmega328 (Arduino Nano 3.x) or ATmega168 (Arduino Nano 2.x).

The Nano has more or less the same functionality of the Arduino Duemilanove, but in a different package. It lacks only a DC power jack and works with a Mini-B USB cable instead of a standard one. The board is designed and produced by Gravitech.

Arduino Pro Mini

Powered by an ATmega328, the Arduino Pro Mini is equipped with 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 8 analog inputs, an on-board resonator, a reset button and some holes for mounting pin headers.

A 6-pin header can be connected to an FTDI cable or Sparkfun breakout board to provide USB power and communication to the board. Note: See also Arduino Pro.

Arduino Fio

The Arduino Fio (V3) is a microcontroller board based on Atmel’s ATmega32U4. It has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 8 analog inputs, an on-board resonator, a reset button and holes for mounting pin headers. It also offers connections for a lithium polymer battery and includes a charge circuit over USB. An XBee socket is available on the bottom of the board.

The Arduino Fio is intended for wireless applications. The user can upload sketches with an a FTDI cable or Sparkfun breakout board. Additionally, by using a modified USB-to-XBee adaptor such as XBee Explorer USB, the user can upload sketches wirelessly. The board comes without pre-mounted headers, facilitating the use of various types of connectors or direct soldering of wires. The Arduino Fio was designed by Shigeru Kobayashi and SparkFun Electronics.

Arduino Zero

Last year, the tandem of Atmel and Arduino debuted the Zero development board – a simple, elegant and powerful 32-bit extension of the platform. The Arduino Zero board packs an Atmel | SMART SAM D21 MCU, which features an ARM Cortex M0+ core. Additional key hardware specs include 256KB of Flash, 32KB SRAM in a TQFP package and compatibility with 3.3V shields that conform to the Arduino R3 layout.

The Arduino Zero boasts flexible peripherals along with Atmel’s Embedded Debugger (EDBG) – facilitating a full debug interface on the SAMD21 without the need for supplemental hardware. Beyond that, EDBG supports a virtual COM port that can be used for device programming and traditional Arduino bootloader functionality. This highly-anticipated board will be available for purchase from the Arduino Store in the U.S. on Monday June 15th.

Arduino AtHeart

The Arduino AtHeart program was specifically launched for Makers and companies with products based on the open-source board that would like to be clearly identified as supporters of the versatile platform. The program is available for any device that includes a processor that is currently supported by the Arduino IDE, including the following Atmel MCUs:

• ATMega328 clocked at 8 or 16 MHz
• ATMega1280 clocked at 16 MHz
• ATMega2560 clocked at 16 MHz
• ATMega32U4 clocked at 16MHz
• Atmel | SMART SAM3X

Participants in the program include startups like:

EarthMake – ArLCD

The touchscreen ArLCD combines the ezLCD SmartLCD GPU with the Arduino Uno.

Bare Conductive Touch Board

The ATmega32U4 based Touch Board can turn nearly any material or surface into a sensor by connecting it to one of its 12 electrodes, using conductive paint or anything conductive.

Blend Micro

The RedBearLab integrated dev platform “blends” the powers of Arduino with Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy into a single board. It is targeted for Makers looking to develop low-power IoT projects in a quick, easy and efficient manner. The MCU is driven by an ATmega32U4 and a Nordic nRF8001 BLE chip.

littleBits Arduino Module

The fan-favorite Arduino module, which happens to also be based on an ATmega32U4, lets users easily write programs in the Arduino IDE to read sensors and control lights and motors within the littleBits system.

Smart Citizen Kit

An Arduino-compatible motherboard with sensors that measure air composition (CO and NO2), temperature, light intensity, sound levels, and humidity. Once configured, the Smart Citizen Kit is capable of streaming data collected by the sensors over Wi-Fi.

Atmel | SMART SAM L21 is winning the low-power battle

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EE Times highlights the ongoing game of leapfrog between MCU vendors for the lowest-power solution. Can you guess who’s winning?

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Writing for EE Times, Rich Quinnell notes that MCU vendors have become engaged in a new game of leapfrog, announcing a slew of products with ever-improving benchmark results and leadership in ultra-low power processing.

“While this may seem like a marketing game, developers will ultimately be the winners as vendors refine their techniques for saving power. In the past, a low powered MCU also meant low performance, but vendors have been challenging this correlation by offering increasingly powerful MCUs for low-power applications,” he writes. “Developers, however, faced a problem in evaluating these offerings. Traditional specifications such as operating current in mW/MHz and sleep-mode leakage currents became increasingly difficult to evaluate in the face of the multiple power states that devices offered, and in the face of inconsistency in the industry in the descriptions and specifications used to characterize low-power operation.”

The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (more commonly referred to as EEMBC) develops benchmarks to help system designers select the optimal processors and understand the performance and energy characteristics of their systems. EEMBC has benchmark suites spanning across countless application areas, targeting just about everything from the cloud and big data, to mobile devices (Android phones and tablets) and digital media, to the Internet of Things and ultra-low power microcontrollers. In particular, the EEMBC ULPBench power benchmark, which was introduced last year, standardizes datasheet parameters and provides a methodology to reliably and equitably measure MCU energy efficiency.

“This is one of the strictest benchmarks we’ve ever done in terms of setup and such. The benchmark has the MCU perform 20k clock cycles of active work once a second, and sleep the remainder of the second. This way each processor performs the same workload, which levels the playing field with regard to executing the benchmark,” EEMBC President Marcus Levy told EE Times in a recent interview.

In order to calculate the final ULPMark-CP score, 1,000 is divided by the median value for average energy used per second during each of 10 benchmark cycles. A larger value therefore represents less energy consumed.

Using this benchmark, MCU vendors have begun publishing their results and surpassing one another to temporarily claim their stake at the top of the low-power leaderboard. Still, the leapfrog game is likely to continue for some time. Andreas Eieland, Atmel Director of Product Marketing explained to EE Times, “Low power is an area where everyone is pouring a lot of R&D into, and it has taken on a much faster pace than before. We know we’re the lowest power now, but you never know where your competition is in its efforts. So, we’re already looking at the next step.”

Eieland points out that at first low-power development efforts mainly concentrated on architectural improvements to the CPU, however optimizing the CPU wasn’t enough. This meant companies needed to begin going through every peripheral and optimizing it, looking at every transistor in the product. He adds, “We [Atmel] started developing clock-on-demand features, logic that allows peripherals to operate stand-alone, using the minimum circuitry needed to complete their task, gating away the clock and even establishing a variety of power domains so we could shut down circuits not in use and eliminate even their leakage current.”

“TI surpassed its own earlier result by announcing the MSP-432 family based on the Cortex M4F. It achieved a ULPBench score of 167.4. While TI was briefing the media on this product, however, Atmel quietly published a ULPBench score of 185.8 for its SAM L21 MCU based on the Cortex M0+, a product announced last year that was scheduled to be released at about this time,” Quinnell reveals.

The Atmel | SMART SAM L21 family delivers ultra-low power running down to 35µA/MHz in active mode, consuming less than 900nA with full 32kB RAM retention, and 200nA in the deepest sleep mode. With rapid wake-up times, Event System, Sleepwalking and the innovative picoPower peripherals, the SAM L21 is ideal for handheld and battery-operated devices in a variety of markets.

As time goes on, we can surely expect to see benchmark scores continue to improve and the competition to pick up. However, despite their differences, everyone can agree that these scores are only a mere starting point for developers seeking the lowest-power device for their design.

“The ULP benchmark isn’t 100% fair; no benchmark can ever be,” Eieland concluded. “But it does take a lot of the marketing out of low power, and it gives you a relative comparison you can use.”

Want to read more? Head over to the entire EE Times write-up here.

Creating a see-through Arduino with an ATmega328P

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CIT is hoping to put the ‘printed’ back into printed circuit boards.

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CIT Technology is a manufacturer of digitally printed flexible electronic circuits. The crew is on a mission to develop low-cost, flexible circuits that will spur the imagination of the next generation of designers. In doing so, they aspire to put the ‘printed’ back into printed circuit boards by using a unique two-stage additive print-and-plate process that deposits solid copper onto low-cost flexible substrates. Building a board on these materials can have some significant advantages over conventionally manufactured PCBs.

If you follow along with our (*cough industry-leading cough*) Twitter account, then you saw how well the audience received CIT’s recent tweet of a see-through Arduino. Created as an example of a module built on low-cost PET, the ‘duino featured 50 micron clear PET and was based on an ATmega328P MCU, enabling it to be linked to other modules to devise entire systems.

“Our see-through Arduino was made to show how quick and simple it is to create your own modules, either as one-offs or in volume,” the team notes.

As part of this project, CIT also made a Bluetooth LE module, a capacitive touchpad set and LED indicator modules. By piecing these components together, you will have all the elements required to construct a Bluetooth widget – what that widget does is entirely up to you.

“This is where we can help you create the next module by printing the designs on PET. The flex circuits are printed on clear or white PET from 50 to 125 microns thick. The tracks are copper so you can solder SMT devices to the tracks using low temperature Tin Bismuth solder.”

PET flexible circuits open up interesting options when it comes to low-cost sensors for lightweight applications, including drones where every gram counts. And of course, these circuits can be folded into awkward shapes.

CIT first began crafting these modules as a sort of “educational” process so that they could document the steps when evolving a modular project to a final dedicated circuit and show how current digital printing processes are now mainstream. Today, the company can print flexible PCBs by the kilometer, and given that the process is completely digital, there are no masks or expensive tooling involved in the setup.

Intrigued? Head over to CIT’s official page here.

Video: Taking a closer look at the Atmel | SMART SAM S70 and E70 MCUs

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ARMDevices.net explores the “world’s fastest ARM Cortex-M.”

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Earlier this year, Atmel expanded upon its Atmel | SMART ARM-based microcontroller family with the launch of four new series of Cortex-M7 based devices, including the SAM S70 and E70 MCUs.

The new devices enable users to scale-up performance and deliver SRAM and system functionality, while keeping the Cortex-M family ease-of-use and maximizing software reuse. The MCUs contain advanced memory architectures with up to 384KB of multi-port SRAM memory, out of which 256KB can be configured as tightly coupled memory delivering zero wait state access at 300MHz. With over four times the performance of current Atmel ARM Cortex-M based MCUs running up to 300MHz, larger configurable SRAM up to 384kB and higher bandwidth peripherals, the new processors give designers the right connectivity, SRAM and performance mix for their industrial, connectivity and automotive designs.

In particular, the SAM S70 series is based on the Cortex-M7 core plus a floating point unit (FPU) extending the general purpose product portfolio with maximum operating speeds up to 300MHz, up to 2MB of Flash, dual 16KB of cache memory and up to 384KB of SRAM with an extensive peripheral set including high-speed USB host and device plus high-speed PHY, up to 8 UARTs, I2S, SD/MMC interface, a CMOS camera interface, system control and analog interfaces.

Aside from the S70 series features, the recently-revealed SAM E70 also includes a 10/100 Ethernet MAC and Dual Bosch CAN-FD interfaces with advanced analog features making them ideal for connectivity applications. The SAM E70 is upwards compatible with Atmel’s SAM4E series.

“All the series offer two Advanced Analog Frontend (AFE) with dual sample and hold capability and Up to 16-bit resolution with hardware oversampling. They also have programmable gain for small signal input. All series offer real-time event management through direct connection between PWM, Timer and ADC for motor control application,” ARMDevices.net writes. “Both series are based on the same feature set, the only difference is coming from the Ethernet, CAN support (SAME70 integrates Ethernet and CAN). Atmel offers all series in BGA and QFP from 64 to 144 pins. Small 64-pin pin count option offers an entry level form factor high performance MCU. All series support the extended Industrial temperature range from -40 to 105°C.”

Watch below as ARMDevices.net catches up with Lionel Perdigon, Atmel Product Marketing Manager, to discuss the latest addition to the Atmel | SMART family.

Report: Smart cities will use 1.1 billion connected things in 2015

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Smart homes to lead with 294 million smart objects in use this year.

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Powered by the Internet of Things (IoT), the smart city of tomorrow will feature intelligent buildings, roads and public transport systems that are connected to each other and its inhabitants through sensors. This real-time information exchange will save people time, reduce environmental impact, lessen traffic and even create value for businesses along the way. Though still relatively new here in the United States, the advent of smart cities has already started taking shape across the world.

Smart homes and commercial buildings will represent 45% of all connected objects in 2015 and 81% by the end of 2020, according to a new report from Gartner. The study also estimates that 1.1 billion Internet-enabled items will be used by smart cities in 2015 with that number to rise to 9.7 billion over the next five years.

The majority of IoT spending for smart cities will come from the private sector, explained Gartner Research VP Bettina Tratz-Ryan. This will surely be some great news for technology companies and service providers that stand to benefit most in terms of revenue.

According to the report, there are a wide-range of IoT deployments for on-street and off-street parking guidance, road traffic guidance and traffic flow metering as well. A quick win within transport is the reduction of traffic congestion. California and the UK have already begun implementing radio receivers or sensors that are embedded on a section of highway to diagnose traffic conditions in real time. Another successful use of IoT in the city is smart parking. The city of Los Angeles, for instance, has been deploying new parking meters, parking space vehicle sensors, real-time parking guidance and a full parking management system to influence demand during peak times.

Beyond that, residential citizens will lead the way by increasingly investing in smart home solutions, with the amount of connected things used in smart homes currently at 294 million and projected to hit 1 billion units by 2017. These include smart LED lighting, healthcare monitoring, smart locks and various sensors for such things as motion detection or carbon monoxide. Smart LED lighting will record the highest growth of IoT consumer applications, from 6 million units in 2015 to 570 million units by 2020. As the study reveals, light will migrate from being an illumination source to a communications carrier incorporating safety, health, pollution and personalized services.

We expect that by 2020, many IoT TSPs will have grown their hardware revenues through services and software by more than 50 percent,” Tratz-Ryan concluded. The researcher goes on to say that smart home security and safety will represent the second-largest service market by revenue in 2017, and that come 2020, the smart healthcare and fitness market will have grown to nearly $38 billion.

Interested in reading more? You can find the entire Gartner report here. Meanwhile, discover how Atmel is powering the IoT by focusing on edge nodes, a category that includes everything from smart home appliances to infrastructures for smart cities.

Cross-board and cross-vendor embedded development with PlatformIO

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Ivan Kravets, PhD, Researcher and Software Architect, explains how PlatformIO is a cross-platform code builder and the missing library manager.

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We live in a time where the wall between the hobbyist and microcontroller (MCU) world has been completely broken. Just a few years ago, no one could have imagined that MCUs would go on to become popular with people who are not familiar with electronics. Nowadays, you don’t need to have deep knowledge in PCB design, assembly language or become buried under MCU application notes to get your first experience with embedded world.

Moreover, vendors have realized that there is a need to decrease entrance threshold and to propose alternatives to existing professional development kits. It was at this point when popular prototype boards (like the Atmel based Arduino) were conceived. Comfortable board form-factor, rich peripheral and huge community of enthusiasts gave rise to a new trend, which can be called “Embedded Boards for Everybody.”

Still, there is a problem related to programming instruments. It’s excellent that MCU vendors have spent quite a bit of efforts to create rich HDKs/SDKs and comfortable IDEs which allow the performing of hardware debugging and tracing. However, all of these features are of interest mostly for those who have already decided which specific MCU they will use for the project. So, at this point the market has generated another demand: to make cross-MCU development easy. This is where Arduino and its burgeoning community have played an important part: cross-platform processing-based Arduino IDE; simple and easy-to-use wiring-based framework with high-level API; incredible count of shields (sensors, actuators, etc.), and a lot of different libraries which cover significant part of hobbyist tasks. These have all made embedded development much easier. Yet, while Arduino enables development for varying MCUs, it is still a commercial product. As a result, it is inherently restricted to Arduino boards.

Saving time for the task in hand

It doesn’t come as a big surprise today when an interesting embedded project is invented by people who have not had any earlier professional experience with MCUs. I feel that this phenomenon can easily be explained with my motto: “Creativity comes from talent and never from knowledge.” Talented people and those with ideas are interested in quick prototype instruments which don’t require big efforts to use them. Many of these people prefer to concentrate on the task in hand, and don’t want to install too much of additional software, play with confused manual or get used to new additional IDE… So far so good, as many of vendor IDEs do address these issues.

However, what if for your next project, you need some board or MCU which aren’t supported by your favorite vendor? With devices becoming increasingly smaller, wireless and battery-powered, this is occurring more frequently. Then, all of a sudden, you have a problem: development platforms from the different vendors tend to recommend their own IDEs and approaches. Subsequently, you’re likely to have several IDEs installed, each with its own requirements (to make things worse, these requirements sometimes conflict with each other), and with an ongoing switching back and forth. Ouch! It’s not before long that this quickly becomes a major headache, and ironically, headache is exactly what these development platforms aim to avoid.

Developer, meet PlatformIO. PlatformIO, meet developer.

Here is where PlatformIO comes in, an open-source cross-platform code builder and library manager (available on GitHub). After many months of development, we have finally released PlatformIO 1.0 which has been recommended for production use.

I admit that, as one of the authors behind PlatformIO, I cannot be 100% objective when speaking about it, but I’ll try.

PlatformIO allows users to:

• Decide which operation system they want to run development process on (You can even use one OS at home and another at work.)
• Choose which editor to use for writing the code (It can be pretty simple editor or powerful favorite IDE.)
• Focus on the code development, significantly simplifying support for the different development platforms, boards and MCUs.

Cross-platform code builder

PlatformIO is independent from the platform, in which it is running. In fact, the only requirement is Python, which exists pretty much everywhere. What this means is that PlatformIO projects can be easily moved from one computer to another, as well as that PlatformIO allows for the easy sharing of projects between team members, regardless of operating system they prefer to work with. Beyond that, PlatformIO can be run not only on commonly used desktops/laptops but also on the servers without X Window System. While PlatformIO itself is a console application, it can be used in combination with one’s favorite IDE or text editor such as Arduino IDE, Eclipse, Visual Studio, Vim or Sublime Text.

Alright, so PlatformIO can run on different operating systems. But more importantly, from development perspective at least, is a list of supported boards and MCUs. To keep things short: PlatformIO supports over 100 embedded boards (all boards which are supported by Arduino IDE) and all major development platforms including Atmel AVR and Atmel | SMART, among many others.

How it works

Without going too deep into PlatformIO implementation details, work cycle of the project developed using PlatformIO is as follows:

• Users choose board(s) interested in project configuration file – “platformio.ini.”
• Based on this list of boards, PlatformIO downloads required toolchains and installs them automatically.
• Users develop code and PlatformIO makes sure that it is compiled, prepared and uploaded to all the boards of interest.

Cross-board code and continuous integration

As aforementioned, PlatformIO supports cross-board code development: multiple boards can be selected in a single project, and PlatformIO will apply all respective environments and will compile the code against each of boards within the project. And for the icing on the cake, this feature can be easily integrated with Continuous Integration System (such Jenkins, Travis CI and Circle CI). It should help to ensure that, at any point, a code at least compiles on all target boards, thereby eliminating costly, time-consuming and error-prone process of fixing these cross-platform issues at later stages, when your team members have already forgotten what the code was about.

The missing library manager

With an overall trend heading towards open-source, embedded development is no exception. Indeed, there are countless embedded libraries already available today, such as high-level communication with sensors, actuators or even full-fledged IoT implementations. Nevertheless, every time you need something like it, there is a big underlying question around where to finding this specific library, and how to make it work with your environment.

To address this problem, PlatformIO Library Manager provides an ecosystem for library writers and library users. Using library manifest file (“library.json”), writers have an ability to describe library. This manifest is not only about such things as authors, description, keywords, and version, but first and foremost about technical information, ranging from location of source code and examples to CVS repository and dependencies. This manifest file is generic enough to be used by other library managers (if somebody else wants to write them).

For the library users (aka developers), PlatformIO provides two ways for searching for libraries. The first way is via Command Line Interface, the other is Web 2.0 Library Search with functionality such as library categories, different framework and platform filters, and advanced search syntax with boolean operations.

PlatformIO Library Manager can be integrated into the most popular IDEs and is capable of extending their functionality, including all-important automated updates of installed libraries. For instance, Arduino IDE benefits of using PlatformIO Library Manager are summarized in the following table:

Conclusion

As noted above, as an author, I cannot be objective when speaking about PlatformIO. However, I am sure that for any kind of cross-board and cross-MCU development PlatformIO provides substantial benefits. PlatformIO takes the hassle out of installing all the tool chains you need, and allows you to build your code for many boards with a single command. PlatformIO Library Manager not only helps you to find and install libraries, but has an option to keep them up to date as well.

And as PlatformIO is an open-source project, you shouldn’t care about price or vendor lock-in. So, what are you waiting for? Give it a try (and if you don’t like it, you’ll get back that zero bucks you’ve paid for it, some restrictions apply, batteries not included).

UPDATE: PlatformIO 1.2.0 is now available. To explore the release history, you can head here.

BBC to give out 1 million devices to kids as part of new initiative

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BBC launches a UK-wide initiative to inspire the next generation of programmers and engineers.

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It’s no secret that the Maker Movement has transcended well beyond the garages and workspaces of a few tinkerers. The phenomenon has proliferated the walls of schools, libraries, museums and retailers, among countless other establishments. Academic institutions and startups, particularly those seen on crowdfunding sites, have developed new projects in hopes of spurring the pursuit of STEM-related fields for the next generation. Maker Faire attendance is also on the rise as thousands of DIYers come together at one of 80 community events spanning across 10 countries. Looking to continue carrying that momentum, BBC has launched a new project — in partnership with over 50 organizations — which is looking to give a personal coding device to every child in year 7 across the country. That’s 1 million free devices in total to students, generally aged between 11 and 13, as part of the campaign they’re calling “Make it Digital.”

Back in the 1980s, the BBC launched a Computer Literacy Project which aimed to support the learning of computing — at the time a relatively new concept for a vast majority — in schools and the home. This included a commercial partnership with Acorn Computers to produce a microcomputer as the backbone of the initiative: the BBC Micro. While nine models were eventually made with the BBC brand, the phrase “Micro” is usually used colloquially to refer to the first six (Model A, B, B+64, B+128, Master 128, and Master Compact). Well now, the news giant is reimagining its popular 1980s campaign by introducing its successor, the BBC Micro Bit.

Based on a processor which would appear to be an ATmega32U4, the Micro Bit will give students a physical companion in their path to coding competence. While merely a prototype at this point, it will be a standalone, palm-sized device equipped with an LED display and compatible with the Touch Develop, Python and C++ languages.

Young Makers will then be able to create text via a series of lights as well as devise basic games. What’s nice is that the final version of Micro Bit will feature a Bluetooth link and will be able to sync up with other incredibly-popular boards like Arduino, Galileo, Kano and Raspberry Pi, in addition to other Micro Bits.

According to BBC, the Micro Bit will be distributed later this year, most likely the fall. The program was designed as a response to a shortage within the digital industry, given that nearly 1.4 million professionals will be needed over the next five years. BBC is hoping to aid in building the country’s talent pool and arming them with the requisite coding skills through a range of new partnerships and projects.

Interested in learning more? Head over to the project’s official page here.