Arduino and Atmel have debuted the Zero development board – a simple, elegant and powerful 32-bit extension of the platform originally established by the popular UNO.
“The Zero board expands the Arduino family by providing increased performance to fuel the creativity of the Maker community,” said Massimo Banzi, Arduino co-founder and CEO.
“The flexible feature set enables endless project opportunities for devices and acts as a great educational tool for learning about 32-bit application development.”
Indeed, the Arduino Zero board packs Atmel’s versatile SAMD21 microcontroller (MCU), which features a 32-bit 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 board also boasts flexible peripherals along with Atmel’s Embedded Debugger (EDBG) – facilitating a full debug interface on the SAMD21 without the need for supplemental hardware.
In addition, EDBG supports a virtual COM port that can be used for device programming and traditional Arduino bootloader functionality.
According to Atmel exec Reza Kazerounian, the Zero board aims to provide creative individuals with the potential to realize truly innovative ideas for smart IoT devices, wearable technology, high-tech automation and robotics.
“Leveraging more than 15 years of experience since the inception of AVR, simplicity and ease-of-use have been at the core of Atmel’s technology,” Kazerounian added.
“[We are] pleased to see the continued growth of the global maker community stemming from the increasing access and availability to open source platforms such as Arduino. We enable Makers, but the power lies within the Makers themselves.”
Interested in checking out an Arduino Zero prototype? You can get up close and personal with the very first prototypes at Maker Faire Bay Area 2014 in San Mateo on May 17 and 18 at the following booths:
- Arduino booth: #204
- Atmel booth: #205
- ARM booth: #405
We’ll see you there!
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