Announced more than a year ago during Maker Faire Bay Area back in 2014, the Arduino Zero is now finally available for purchase in the United States.
On the surface the board may look very similar to the Arduino Leonardo, but there are big differences. Powered by a 32-bit ARM Cortex M0+ core, the Atmel SAMD21, the new board is significantly faster than the traditional 8-bit Arduino boards, running at 48MHz, and is much more capable.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOUALurj5P4]While it shares the same form factor as the Arduino Leonardo — with 14 digital and 5 analog pins — all of the digital pins except the Rx/Tx pins can act as PWM pins, and the analog pins have a 12-bit ADC instead of the Leonardo’s 10-bit ADC, giving significantly better analog resolution.
The new board comes with 256KB of Flash memory, and 32KB of SRAM. In comparison the 8-bit Leonardo which uses the Atmel ATmega32u4 comes with just 32KB of Flash memory and 2.5KB of SRAM.
However one of the most interesting additions to the new board is the Atmel Embedded Debugger (EDBG), which provides a full debug interface without the need for additional hardware.
The new board from Arduino LLC comes some time after the release of the “Arduino Zero Pro” by Arduino Srl, and significantly ships with the new Genuino branding announced by Massimo Banzi at this year’s Maker Faire Bay Area. This is part of the ongoing legal dispute between this two companies over the Arduino brand, which probably also led to the extended delay in the release of the board.
The dispute also means that those outside of the United States might have to wait a bit longer for a Genuino branded version of the board to ship. Right now you can’t buy an Arduino board from Arduino LLC in their European store, they’re all listed as “Out of Stock.”
The new Arduino Zero board requires the latest 1.6.x release of the IDE, and is available in the U.S. from the Arduino Store.
9 thoughts on “The Arduino Zero is Now Shipping in the US”
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When an ATmega328 board can be had for $10-$20, Teensy for $20, Raspberry Pi for $40, who is the $50 Zero for? Other than Atmel, that is?
People who want more memory, more processing speed and for those who like to debug their code.
Teensy is a cortex M4 with DSP (single cycle 32bit math operations), much faster for $20…. but i suppose manufacturing in the US cost a lot more.
I think Teensy is made in the US. It’s far from a cheapie board– the support and libraries are fantastic.
To be clear: I’m a big fan of Arduino. My point is that Arduino’s moves seem out of step with the market.
Depends which bit of the market you’re looking at I think. The Zero obviously doesn’t appeal to you, but the trend towards the smaller boards — the Teensy, the ESP8266, the Light Blue Bean — is only one of the things that’s happening in the micro controller marketplace right now, https://makezine.com/magazine/make-43/a-smorgas-board-for-your-computing-pleasure/.
$50 for a 32-bit board is just too much money. $35– original Arduino price– would be more palatable, but $50 without ethernet or radio or other special features is out of line with the boards you mentioned in that article.
For makers starting out, 8-bit Arduino is still overkill for many applications. Teensy and Pi are accessible ways to harness more power, and Gemma/Trinket make sense if going the other way.
“Don’t be afraid of failing” translates to me as “don’t be afraid to fry the board.” A $50 dev board simply does not make sense in that context or in the current marketplace, and it shows that Arduino has strayed from its accessible, risk-friendly roots. There’s a lot to be said for a board with a DIP chip that can be fried and replaced, not to mention a voltage regulator and caps that aren’t a bear to swap out if their blue smoke escapes too.
Don’t forget ESP8266 boards, they go from 3$ to 10$ and they have WiFi. I’m not getting a Zero for 40$ when I can get a Teensy 3.1 for 20$ and a LC for 10$.
They could have made the Zero 5v tolerant at least if it was targeted to beginners
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