Rewind: 50 boards you’ll want to know about from 2015

---

Here’s a look at a bunch of boards that caught our attention over the last 12 months. Feel free to share your favorites below! 

---

“Hardware becomes a piece of culture that anyone can build upon, like a poem or a song.” – Massimo Banzi

Arduino Zero

A 32-bit Arduino powered by the Atmel | SMART SAM D21.

Arduino Wi-Fi Shield 101

An IoT shield with CryptoAuthentication that enables you to wirelessly connect your Arduino or Genuino with ease.

Arduino MKR1000

A powerful board that combines the functionality of the Zero and the connectivity of the Wi-Fi Shield.

Atmel | SMART SAM L21

A game-changing family of Cortex-M0+ MCUs that deliver power consumption down to 35 µA/MHz in active mode and 200nA in sleep mode.

BTLC1000

An ultra-low power Bluetooth Smart SoC with an integrated ARM Cortex-M0 MCU and transceiver.

Atmel | SMART SAMA5D2

An ARM Cortex-A5-based MPU that offers great features integrated into lower pin count packages, making it ideal for applications where security, power consumption and space constraints are key considerations.

Atmel | SMART SAM S70/E70

An ARM Cortex-M7-based MCU with a floating point unit (FPU) that’s ideal for connectivity and general purpose industrial applications.

ATmegaS128

A space-ready version of the popular ATmega128.

Adafruit Feather

A new line of development boards that, like it’s namesake, are thin, light and let your ideas fly. Expect Feather to become a new standard for portable MCU cores.

Adafruit METRO 328

An ATmega328-driven processor packed with plenty of GPIO, analog inputs, UART, SPI and I2C, timers, and PWM galore – just enough for most simple projects.

Arduino GEMMA

A miniature wearable board based on the ATtiny85.

Adafruit Bluefruit LE Micro

A board that rolls the versatility of the ATmega32U4 and the wireless connectivity of the SPI Bluefruit LE Friend all into one.

SparkFun Stepoko

An Arduino-compatible, 3-axis control solution that runs grbl software.

SparkFun SAM D21 Breakout

An Arduino-sized breakout for the ATSAMD21G18.

Bosch Sensortec BMF055

A compact 9-axis motion sensor, which incorporates an accelerometer, a gyroscope and a magnetometer along with an Atmel | SMART SAM D20 ARM Cortex M0+ core.

BNO055 Xplained Pro

A new extension board, which features a BNO055 intelligent 9-axis absolute orientation sensor, that connects directly to Atmel’s Xplained board making it ideal for prototyping projects for IoT apps.

SmartEverything

A prototyping platform that combines SIGFOX, BLE, NFC, GPS and a suite of sensors. Essentially, it’s the Swiss Army knife for the IoT.

Qduino Mini

A tiny, Arduino-compatible board with a built-in battery connector and charger built-in, as well as a fuel gauge.

Tessel 2

A dev board with a SAM D21 coprocessor, reliable Wi-Fi, an Ethernet jack, two USB ports and a system that runs real Node.js/io.js.

LattePanda

A Windows 10 single-board computer equipped with an Intel Atom x5-Z8300 Cherry Trail processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage and an ATmega32U4 coprocessor.

LightBlue Bean+

An Arduino-compatible board that is programmed wirelessly using Bluetooth Low Energy.

Makey Makey GO

A thumbdrive-shaped device that can transform ordinary objects into touch pads.

Hak8or

An uber mini, DIY board based on an Atmel | SMART AT91SAM9N12 that runs Linux via a USB drive.

Modulo

A set of tiny modular circuit boards that takes the hassle out of building electronics.

Microduino mCookie

A collection of small, magnetically stackable modules that can bring your LEGO projects to life.

The AirBoard

A compact, open source, wireless and power efficient dev board designed to learn, sketch and deploy prototypes out in the field.

Autonomo

A matchbox-sized, Arduino-compatible MCU powered by a small solar panel.

Helium

An integrated platform that brings the power of the cloud to the edge of the network, enabling you to observe, learn and capture actionable insights from existing physical ‘things’ in your environment.

Sense HAT

An add-on for the Raspberry Pi equipped with a gyroscope, an accelerometer, a magnetometer, a temperature sensor, a barometric pressure sensor and a humidity sensor, as well as a five-button joystick and an 8×8 RGB LED matrix — all powered by an LED driver chip and an ATtiny88 running custom firmware.

Ardhat

A HAT with an Arduino-compatible processor that responds quickly to real-time events, while letting the Raspberry Pi do all of the heavy lifting.

Wino

A cost-effective, Arduino-compatible board with built-in Wi-Fi.

pico-Platinchen

A little board designed for wearable devices that features a BNO055, an ATmega328P and a CR2032 coin-cell battery.

 XeThru X2M200 and X2M300

A pair of adaptive smart sensor modules that can monitor human presence, respiration and other vital information.

LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo

An Arduino Yún-friendly platform powered by an ATmega32U4 and MediaTek MT7688 SoC.

Piccolino

A small, inexpensive controller with an embedded OLED display and Wi-Fi connectivity that you can program using existing tools like the Arduino IDE.

ZeroPi

A next-generation, Arduino and Raspberry Pi-compatible dev kit for robotic motion structure systems and 3D printers that boasts an Atmel | SMART SAM D21 at its core.

CryptoShield

A dedicated security peripheral for the Arduino and was made in collaboration with SparkFun’s previous hacker-in-residence, Josh Datko. This shield adds specialized ICs that perform various cryptographic operations which will allow you to add a hardware security layer to your Arduino project.

ZYMKEY

An add-on board that makes it easy to secure your Raspberry Pi and Linux applications.

Flip & Click

A two-sided, Arduino-like board with an AT91SAM3X8E for its heart.

ChipWhisperer-Lite

An open source toolchain for embedded hardware security research including side-channel power analysis and glitching. The board uses a Spartan 6 LX9, along with a 105 MS/s ADC, low-noise amplifier, an Atmel | SMART SAM3U chip for high-speed USB communication, MOSFETs for glitch generation and an XMEGA128 as a target device.

KeyDuino

An Arduino Leonardo-like board with built-in NFC that lets you replace your keys with any smartphone, NFC ring or proximity card.

Neutrino

An inexpensive, open source and shrunken-down version of the Arduino Zero that boasts a 32-bit ATSAMD21G18 running at 48MHz and packing 32K of RAM.

WIOT

An open source, Arduino-compatible board with an ATmega32U4, ESP8266 Wi-Fi module and lithium-ion battery support.

Obscura

An ATmega32U4-powered, 8-bit synthesizer that enables you to create NES, C64 and Amiga-style chiptune music by simply connecting a MIDI device.

Zodiac FX

An OpenFlow switch that is powerful enough to develop world-changing SDN apps yet small enough to sit on your desk. Based on an Atmel | SMART SAM4E, the unit includes four 10/100 Fast Ethernet ports with integrated magnetics and indicator LEDs along with a command line interface accessible via USB virtual serial port.

Goldilocks Analogue

A board that brings sophisticated analog and audio input, output and storage capabilities to the Arduino environment.

NodeIT

A super small and expandable IoT system for Makers.

Pixel

A smart display that features an Atmel | SMART SAM D21 MCU operating at 48MHz and packing 32K of RAM, along with a 1.5” 128×128 pixel OLED screen and a microSD slot.

SDuino

An Arduino crammed inside an SD card.

… and how could we not mention this?

The WTFDuino!

Do you feel like today’s MCUs are too simple and sensible? Well, one Maker decided to take a different approach by “undesigning” the Arduino into a banana-shaped processor whose form factor is impossible to breadboard and whose pins are incorrectly labelled.

 

Introducing the new Power Debugger

---

Atmel has unveiled a new high-performance debugging tool with advanced power visualization for ultra-low-power designs.

---

If you’re seeking a high-accuracy debugging tool that lets you visualize the power usage of your product during development, you’re in luck. That’s because Atmel has unveiled a new Power Debugger, the latest dev tool for debugging and programming both Atmel | SMART Cortex-M–based and AVR MCUs that use JTAG, SWD, PDI, debugWIRE, aWire, TPI or SPI target interfaces.

With ultra-low power being such a critical factor in next-generation IoT, wearable and battery-operated devices, having the ability to locate code where power spikes occur is crucial. The Power Debugger features two independent current-sensing channels for collecting power measurements during application execution (one high resolution channel that can measure 100nA to 100mA and one lower resolution channel that can measure 1mA to 1A), and streams such collected measurements to the Atmel Data Visualizer — available in the Atmel Studio 7 IDE — for real-time analysis and display. The program graphs power usage and utilizes this data to estimate application battery life. What’s more, the Data Visualizer allows developers to correlate power samples with the code that was executing when the sample was taken, greatly reducing the time required to identify “hot spots” in the developers’ application.

“Lowering overall power consumption is key to many customer designs and essential for battery-operated and wearable designs,” explains Steve Pancoast, Atmel Vice President of Software Development, Applications and Tools. “Atmel provides cost-effective, easy-to-use tools that make it possible for our developers to profile the power usage of applications running on their own hardware as part of the standard development cycle. The Power Debugger is part of Atmel’s pledge to bring the latest tools to market, enabling developers to quickly get their prototype to production with the lowest power consumption.”

The Power Debugger is now available on Atmel’s online store and and through a variety of distributors. Each kit consists of a main unit with plastic back-plate, two USB cables, a 10-lead squid cable, a flat cable (10-pin 50mil connector and 6-pin 100mil connector), an adapter board (20-pin 100mil connector, 6-pin 50mil connector and 10-pin 100mil connector) and a 20-pin 100mil jumper cable.

IoT spending will grow from $699 billion in 2015 to $1.3 trillion in 2019

---

Billions of devices, trillions of dollars! Insurance, healthcare and consumer markets expected to see the fastest growth over the next five years.

---

Worldwide spending on the Internet of Things is expected to be $698.6 billion this year and grow at a 17% CAGR to nearly $1.3 trillion in 2019, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).

At the moment, the Asia-Pacific region accounts for more than 40% of worldwide IoT spending, followed by North America and Western Europe. The APAC’s activity is being fueled by developing countries’ continuing technology investment needs, government investments incorporating more IoT components, and a burgeoning new consumer class spending more on smart goods and services.

However, the regions that will experience the fastest growth in IoT spending over the five years are Latin America (26.5% CAGR), followed by Western Europe, and Central and Eastern Europe.

While manufacturing and transportation led the world in IoT spending ($165.6 billion and $78.7 billion, respectively) in 2015, the insurance, healthcare and consumer verticals are projected to experience the fastest growth through 2020.

The IDC also points out some of the unique fastest growing use cases in each global region. Take North America, for example. The IoT is thriving thanks to retailers deploying in-store contextual marketing like beacons, real-time streams of data from mobile devices, online consumer activity, as well as video cameras to gain insight into behavior and trends.

In Asia-Pacific, vehicle-mounted devices are being employed to monitor driver behavior to determine insurance rates, whereas in EMEA, a great deal of money is being poured into smart buildings to automate maintenance and operations. Meanwhile in Latin America, the fastest growing IoT category is field service, where service data is automatically measured, recorded and transferred remotely for monitoring and use by technicians.

This report piggybacks off recent research from Gartner which estimated that by the end of 2016, 6.4 billion devices will be connected to the Internet with as many as 5.5 million new things joining every day. That number represents a 30% jump from 2015, and will continue rising to 20.8 billion by 2020.

SmartEgg connects all your remotes to your phone

---

A truly universal and eggscellent remote for the Internet of Things.

---

It seems like today we have remote controls for everything and keeping track of them can be a hassle. Our current home entertainment systems alone require more than one remote to rev up our TV, cable box, audio system and DVD player. Do we honestly use all the buttons on each of these remotes? Unlikely. The team at AICO Technologies are making things easier for us by replacing all of those remote controls with just one.

You may be thinking, “But universal remotes already exist!” True, but what’s been on the market is either only for home entertainment or smart home automation. What about the other appliances with controls in our house? Meet SmartEgg, an all-in-one smart remote that pairs to your phone. It not only controls your home electronics, but also your thermostat and any infrared devices via Bluetooth.

SmartEgg is backed with a cloud database that already contains a growing list of over 5,500 remote controllers and 125,000 infrared hex codes, so it can sync your phone to any of your devices. Additionally, SmartEgg has self-learning capabilities for the slim chance that your gadget is not in the database.

Since SmartEgg stores all the control keys of your appliances, you can combine keys from any of those controllers to fit your scene. Its user-friendly interface allows you to customize the control buttons by removing unwanted buttons and reordering them. Now you’ll have a control with only the functions you need. This is ideal for your home entertainment experience. The process of turning on your TV and DVD player, then switching to DVD input and pressing play, is minimized to a single click.

What really sets SmartEgg apart from other universal remotes is its smart technology. Living up to its name, SmartEgg interacts with other devices if certain conditions are meet. For example, it can mute the TV when you’re receiving a call or set the thermostat an hour early before you arrive home from work. The unit employs Bluetooth Low Energy proximity sensing, also known as iBeacon technology, which triggers a scene automatically whenever your phone is detected nearby.

The SmartEgg boasts a wireless reach of 20m (65ft) indoors and 50m (164ft) outdoors, as well as an infrared range of more than 10m (32ft). With SmartEgg, you no longer have the inconvenience of replacing batteries for your various remote controls. Its battery consumes less energy, making it last over 12 months.

Interested? Head over to the SmartEgg’s Kickstarter page, where the AICO team is nearing its $50,000 goal. Delivery is expected to get underway in February 2016.

This app lets you program objects by drawing lines

---

Like something out of science fiction, the Reality Editor lets you connect and manipulate the functionality of physical objects. 

---

Back in 2013, a team from MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group developed a method of creating Spatially-Aware Embodied Manipulation of Actuated Objects through augmented reality. The project was an effort to extend a user’s touchscreen interactions into the real world. Earlier this year, the crew released libraries and examples that could also allow others to do the same. With Open Hybrid, you could directly map a digital interface onto a physical thing and program hybrid objects using Arduino and other popular hardware/software environments.

Now, the researchers have taken the project to a whole new level. The Reality Editor is a futuristic tool that empowers you to connect and manipulate the functionality of any gizmo or gadget. Just point your smartphone camera at an item and an overlay with its invisible capabilities will appear on the screen for you to edit. Drag a virtual line from one to another and form a new relationship between the two.

Although the ultimate goal of the IoT is to make ordinary objects life in our smart, most things are still pretty ‘dumb.’ They don’t communicate with one another, and most are only capable of one function. Let’s take a smart bulb for instance, which can dim and brighten, but it can’t change the channel on your TV. This is where the Fluid Interfaces Group’s app comes in.

The Reality Editor lets you define simple actions, change the functionality of objects around you, and remix how things work and interact. Essentially, the app gives you the power to turn something that is virtual into something that is physical and vice versa. The best part? It’s as easy as connecting dots.

“That light switch in your bedroom you always need to stand up in order to turn off — just point the Reality Editor at an object next to your bed and draw a line to the light. You have just customized your home to serve your convenience,” the team writes. “From now on you will use your spatial coordination and muscle memory to easily operate the object next to your bed as a tool for controlling the light.”

What’s more, you can ‘borrow’ functionalities from one object and use them on another. For example, you could employ your TV’s sleep timer as a way to switch your lights on and off, or even have the air conditioning at your house adjust the temperature when you hop into your car to head home. The possibilities are endless.

At the moment, the Reality Editor utilizes QR-like codes to identify smart devices. It works by prompting an HTML webpage and overlays a particular object’s functionalities onto the smartphone so you can program it. However, it will soon be able to recognize the objects as they are viewed with the app.

The Reality Editor can be downloaded and used along with the group’s open source platform Open Hybrid to build a new generation of Hybrid Objects. This isn’t solely geared towards designers and engineers, but Makers and other high-tech enthusiasts as well. Safe to say, a Minority Report-like future is quickly approaching.

 

ONAGOfly is an auto-following, palm-sized drone

---

This drone proves big things can come in small packages. 

---

In today’s market, consumers have pretty much two choices: cheaper nano drones or larger, pricier quadcopters. ONAGOfly wants to be the best of both worlds. Not only does it let users capture high-res selfies and live-stream footage to their mobile devices, the palm-sized unit only costs $200.

This consumer-friendly drone boasts a safe design, suitable for both indoor and outdoor use, and can be piloted right out of the box. It can be set to automatically follow you, or you can use its accompanying app to control the drone via Wi-Fi (up to a distance of 66 feet).

With its video game-inspired tilt control mode, ONAGOfly can be steered simply by turning its paired smartphone left and right, or up and down to fly higher and lower. Meanwhile, photos and videos can seamlessly sync to a user’s handheld gadget for instant sharing.

ONAGOfly can take off and land right from your hand, and be launched with the press of a button. The tiny UAV features built-in infrared sensors on all four sides, allowing it to avoid any potential collisions with obstacles in its way. Additionally, ONAGOfly’s GPS module enables it to automatically follow someone using the location of its connected smartphone as they run, snowboard, cycle, surf or whatever else.

According to company founder Sam Tsu, the mini ‘copter can be used by everyone of all ages and experience levels. This includes athletes, travelers, wedding planners and other drone enthusiasts.

In terms of its camera, ONAGOfly’s images and videos are being touted as comparable to that of an iPhone 6 (15MP photo and 1080P HD at 30fps video). With P2P streaming, users can watch footage in real-time from a remote device without delay. To maximize group photos, the drone can even recognize faces and detect smiles once all subjects are in the frame, and then snap the picture.

Thanks to a 1000mAh LiPo battery, users can expect around 12-15 minutes of flight time. The ONAGOfly weighs only 140 grams (0.3 pounds), and can reportedly maintain its position in wind speeds of up to 10.8 feet per second.

Interested? Head on over to ONAGOfly’s Indiegogo campaign, where the nano drone’s creators have already flown right by their goal of $150,000. Delivery is slated for February 2016.

This DIY meter will measure your creativity

---

Transmission is a creativity measurement system comprised of a wristband and a desktop LED display.

---

Ask any Maker or engineer, and they’ll all tell you the same thing: it’s too easy to get stuck overthinking your ideas and letting your wheels turn without making any progress on the task at hand. It’s crucial for us to get out of our own heads and sketch these concepts as they come. Although this requires plenty of practice, the more things that we jot down, the more we can create, and thus the better we can share our ideas.

Inspired by Craighton Berman’s Pencil Sharpener, SVA’s Products of Design program student Jenna Witzleben has come up with a slick way to measure creativity depending on how much you draw.

Transmission consists of two parts: a wristband that tracks your drawing and a wooden desktop display to monitor your progress. The wearable device accommodates any tool preference, whether that’s a pencil, a Sharpie market or even finger paint.

In terms of hardware, Witzleben employed an Adafruit FLORA (ATmega32U4) and an accelerometer along with a pair of XBee radios — one attached to the FLORA, another to an Arduino Uno (ATmega328) inside the tabletop tracker. The modules wirelessly communicate motion data to the creativity meter, which is embedded with NeoPixels that illuminate a series of bars based on output.

The bracelet is powered by a LiPo battery, while the LED display is driven by a 5V supply to a power jack and another supply to the Uno.

Intrigued? Head over to Witzleben’s page on Instructables, where you will find a detailed step-by-step overview of the page along with its customizable code. You can see it all in action below!

[h/t Adafruit]

JöLLY Tracker is a shockingly awesome way to spread holiday spirit

---

This Santa-like beard uses sensors to gently zap your face as a reminder to turn that frown upside down.

---

You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, the JöLLY Tracker is why. Truth be told, the holiday season can be a stressful one. Between deciding what to get loved ones to navigating your way through crowded malls, sometimes all that happiness can get lost in the hustle and bustle.

Developed by creative ad agency McKinney, the JöLLY Tracker is a wearable of a different kind. It’s not a fitness tracker. It’s not a smartwatch. It’s not even a hat. It’s an embedded Santa Claus beard that has one job, and one job only: to monitor how much you smile. Should you frown, it’ll emit a friendly little reminder in the form of an electric shock to your face. Ho, ho, how about that?

A team of creatives and hackers wanted to devise a wearable concept that would skip the normal metric tracking and go straight to helping spread some cheer.

“We wear devices on our wrists, pin them to our clothes, carry them in our pockets, each one sending us data about our well-being in hope of improving our lives,” McKinney’s ECD Peter Nicholson explains. “JöLLY is a spoof on our obsession with wearables and data. It is, simply, a joyful reminder that the holidays are the happiest time of the year.”

The setup is fairly simple, and resembles that of a recent project from our good pal Simone Giertz. A set of five electrodes are attached to the wearer’s face: two to monitor muscle movement, two to give off the shock, and most importantly, one for ground.

Hidden behind the white facial hair lies an Arduino, a Muscle SpikerShield, a battery pack and a TENS unit that gently jolts the nerves in your face. The JöLLY Tracker is controlled by an accompanying Android app that communicates with the beard over Bluetooth. It counts how many times a minute your smiling, measures the intensity of your smile and displays real-time changes in jolliness over preset intervals. If you’re too grumpy, JöLLY will send electric pulses to your cheeks and jaw. Safe to say, you’ll turn that frown upside down in no time — albeit nervously.

So in the words of Clark Griswold, just “press on and have the hap, hap, happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap-danced with Danny ****** Kaye.”

[Images: Engadget]

This smart lamp lets you ‘paint the light’ in your room

---

FLUXO is a full LED fixture, not just another smart bulb.

---

Although the idea of a smart lamp is nothing new, one Austrian startup has come up with an innovative design that allows you to move the light using simple paint gestures on your smartphone.

Thanks to FLUXO, any mood is now possible using a single pendant lamp comprised of 300 LEDs with an output of up to 2800 lumens. An accompanying mobile app enables you to control the intensity, direction, color and overall distribution of light to particular areas with a mere gesture.

Instead of dimming the light in your room, the Luke Roberts team’s “Paint Your Light” approach makes it easy to adjust the lighting for any space, time of the day, mood or social situation. The more you “paint,” the brighter it gets, while the other parts of your room will remain subdued. FLUXO even illuminates immediately to provide you with real-time feedback.

“The dining room, for example, can be personalized to have a portion of FLUXO focused solely on the table while having the remaining LEDs emit a soft, ambient glow to the rest of the room,” the crew writes.

You can independently control downlight and uplight, which gives a pleasant indirect light to create different moods, which is not possible with other lamps. Particular light scenes can be stored on the app for each FLUXO lamp, which includes intuitive motion sensors connected with smart software in the lamp that can learn how people prefer their lighting based on their overall usage. You can store any setting as a light scene and come back to it with just one swipe of your finger. What’s more, the app lets you seamlessly switch between FLUXOs.

When you don’t have your phone in hand but want to change to another light scene, you can do so by simply turning the light switch off and on again. The lamp recognizes this “click” and switches to the next scene. FLUX’s presence sensors also can detect when you walk into a room and turn itself on. Conversely, it will shut itself off as you leave to save energy.

Unlike other competitors in the growing smart lighting market, Luke Roberts has developed a fixture with built-­in LEDs that allow the FLUXO to give off increased light output compared to more conventional LED bulbs, directional lighting controllable at different angles and improved heat management for a longer lifetime.

FLUXO comes with a specially-designed mount to fit it to any kind of flat ceiling surface, and has universal power supply so that it can be directly connected to any outlet. The team has carefully engineered the lamp with all relevant sensors and a future-proof Bluetooth wireless module, so that new features can be added down the road.

Sound like a smart fixture you’d love to have in your smart home? Head over to FLUXO’s Kickstarter campaign, where the Luke Roberts team is currently seeking $54,266. Delivery is slated for late summer 2016.

 

The Arduino MKR1000 rolls the Zero and Wi-Fi Shield all into one

---

The World’s Largest Arduino Maker Challenge will award 1,000 finalists with the newly-announced MKR1000 boards.

---

Well, the Arduino/Genuino family has just gained another member. Everyone, meet the MKR1000. MKR1000, meet the ever-growing Maker community.

This MKR1000 is a powerful board that combines the functionality of the Zero (Atmel | SMART SAM D21) and the connectivity of the Wi-Fi Shield. It is based on the ATSAMW25 — an Atmel SmartConnect edge node module specifically geared towards IoT — and offers the ideal solution for Makers seeking Wi-Fi connectivity with minimal previous experience in networking.

The combination of 32-bit computational power like the Zero, the usual rich set of I/O interfaces, low-power Wi-Fi with a CryptoAuthentication chip for secure communication, and the ease of use of the Arduino IDE make this board the perfect choice for emerging IoT battery-powered projects in a compact form factor. It should be noted, however, that unlike most Arduino and Genuinos, the MKR1000 runs at 3.3V.

Other key specs include:

• MCU: Atmel | SMART SAMD21 Cortex-M0+
• Power Supply: 5V
• Flash: 256KB
• SRAM: 32KB
• Clock Speed: 32KHz, 32.768KHz, 8MHz and 48Mhz
• Supported Battery: Li-Po single-cell, 3.7V, 700mAh minimum
• Digital I/O Pins: 8
• PWM Pins: 4 (D2-D5)
• UART: 1
• SPI: 1
• I2C: 1
• Analog Input Pins: 7 (ADC 8/10/12-bit)
• Analog Output Pins: 1 (DAC 10-bit)
• External Interrupts: 8
• DC Current Per I/O Pin: 7mA

The newly-revealed board will be available for purchase beginning in February 2016; however, you can be one of the first 1,000 people to lay their hands on the MKR1000 by participating in the World’s Largest Arduino Maker Challenge, a collaboration between Hackster.IO, Microsoft, Adafruit and Atmel.

This contest is designed to celebrate the burgeoning Maker community with exclusive prizes. Inventors, artists, hobbyists, professionals and developers alike are encouraged to create an innovative and original IoT application, ranging from environmental sensors to gaming, to augmented reality, to robotics or drones using the power of Arduino.cc boards and Windows 10.

The 1,000 Makers who submit the best project ideas will receive the brand-spanking new Arduino MKR1000 (U.S. only) and Genuino MKR1000 (outside the U.S.) boards. Earn bonus points by tapping into the power of the Microsoft Azure cloud to capture, analyze and visualize your data with Azure IoT Suite, Azure IoT Hub, Stream Analytics and Machine Learning.

From there, three finalists submitting the best completed projects will be awarded with a fully-funded trip to either Maker Faire Shenzhen, New York or Rome, a chance to present their creation at the Microsoft and the Arduino and Genuino booths, a professional video production of the project, as well as a whopping $500 gift certificate to Adafruit.

The World’s Largest Arduino Maker Challenge is now live, and those wishing to partake in the contest can sign up/log into Hackster and enter to win the new MKR1000 board by pitching their idea.