Arduino and Atmel debut Zero dev board

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!

Atmel Makers make mainstream news

At Atmel, we’ve known for a while now that embedded computing is the future, but it’s nice to see the mainstream media catching on! 

ABC recently made it down to Maker Faire in San Mateo, where the crew spent a significant amount of time hanging out at the Atmel booth, talking Internet of Things and, of course, Arduino.

The ABC video even features our very own engineering rockstar, Bob Martin, who spent most of Maker Faire Hexbug hacking.

“There are billions of these parts out there now, it’s in everything,” said Martin.

CEO of Faraday Bicycles, Adam Vollmer also got some ABC airtime to explain the power behind the peddles.

“We got an ambient light sensor that looks at how bright it is, and turns the light on automatically, we’re going to have bluetooth, so it will talk to your phone, it will track where your bike is, how far you’ve ridden, you can adjust the pedal assist,” he explained.

ABC even managed to catch up with Arduino Co-Founder, Massimo Banzi to get his opinion on the open source board revolution.

“I see all this amazing stuff that people are doing, and I am constantly still finding moments where I go, wow,” Banzi said.

You can see more of ABC’s Maker Faire coverage here.

12 year old CEO shows off Atmel powered robots

Meet Quin, CEO and founder of QTechKnow. Unlike most CEOs, Quin is just 12 years old, but that hasn’t stopped him from running a wildly successful electronics blog, his own YouTube channel and amassing a ton of loyal friends and fans on Twitter. The mini maker has a major passion for electronics and especially Arduino, having racked up a plethora of advanced projects and even making his own PCBs.

Atmel caught up with Quin at Maker Faire in San Mateo last weekend to examine a couple of his creations, the Fuzzbot and the Android DiceBot.

Fuzzbot is an awesome, fast, fully autonomous small Arduino robot which uses the compact Pololu ZumoBot Chassis kit for a great drive system, and uses a Parallax Ping sensor to sense proximity, to make it fully autonomous.

Quin says he likes to think of the Fuzzbot as a cheap and hackable “mini Roomba” because it uses a Swiffer Duster on the back to pick up any unwanted dirt off of the floor.

Quin programmed the Arduino code using the simple Pololu ZumoBot library, and used the Ping library to interface with the Ping sensor.  The FuzzBot also has a pan/tilt servo for the Ping sensor, and can be used with the Servo Arduino library. You can check out the parts Quin used in the picture below:

DiceBot, on the other hand, is an electronic dice that fits into an Android figurine.  It has a 7-Segment display, a 74HC595 shift register, an accelerometer, and an ATmega328p (the Arduino microcontroller).

Quin said he used his Pineapple library to drive the 7-Segment LED with the 74HC595, his Quasi-duino core for the ATmega328p without the clock, and the free Arduino IDE to program the ATmega328p.

Here are the parts Quin used when putting together Dicebot:

Arduino making a mark at Maker Faire

I don’t usually make a big deal of my upcoming weekends, but when I get the chance to hang out in a human-size mouse trap, buzz around a giant Hand of Man robot, or get my code on competitively in a variety of hacker races, it’s worth talking up a bit.

Before you wonder whether I’ve managed to contract an unhealthy dose of hallucinogenic corporate cube fever, don’t panic! I’m referring to the upcoming Maker Faire, to be held at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds on the 18/19 of May.

Maker Faire, created by Make magazine back in 2006, stitches together the arts and crafts with engineering and science.

It’s a huge science fair for the general public, where Do-It-Yourselfers are free to roam around unleashed (usually on their segways) wearing propeller beanies and flashy LED pins without anybody judging them. Much.

Tinkerers little and large take center stage at Maker Faire, showing the world their zany contraptions and electrifying experiments, while trading tips and tricks for others who want to follow in their low power footsteps.

And Atmel, I’m proud to say, is all over it.

Why? Because in many ways, Atmel powers the maker movement, with its tech at the heart of so many maker designs. It helps, of course, that Atmel microprocessors are the chips of choice for the Arduino platform, both in their AVR flavor and ARM varieties.

Arduino has democratized hardware in a way that allows anyone – young or old, engineer or not, rich or poor – to scratch their own itch and create anything they can imagine.

As Arduino’s founder, Massimo Banzi, puts it, “You don’t need anyone’s permission to create something great.”

Indeed, with Arduino even finding its way into every single MakerBot 3D printer, creativity now really knows no bounds.

At Maker Faire, Atmel will be right across from our friends and partners at Arduino (Booth #625 and #619 for the location sticklers) and along with a pretty slick booth design made up entirely of cardboard furniture (Chairigami!!), we’ll have quite a bit going on.

For starters, we’ll have some MakerBot demos and an “IoTorium” (which I’m assuming is an emporium of awesome Internet of Things devices).

Speaking of awesome “things”, the folks from PuzzleBox will be pitching up in Atmel’s booth with their brain-controlled helicopters, alongside the cool riders from Faraday Bikes who will be peddling their electric bicycle wares.

We’ll also have some cute hackable Hexbugs crawling around and for those keeping an eye on the time, some smart watches from Secret Labs (shhhh!).

The Maker movement is a passionate one, and Atmel’s pretty passionate about being a part of it. If you can’t make it to Maker Faire, no sweat. You can follow all the goings on via Twitter. Just look for the hashtags @makerfaire, @atmel, @arduino.

Hope to see you there!