Mega Arduino announcement has GIGA impact

Arduino Electronics
Mega Arduino announcement has GIGA impact

By David Groom

David Groom

David bought his first Arduino in 2007 as part of a Roomba hacking project. Since then, he has been obsessed with writing code that you can touch. David fell in love with the original Pebble smartwatch, and even more so with its successor, which allowed him to combine the beloved wearable with his passion for hardware hacking via its smartstrap functionality. Unable to part with his smartwatch sweetheart, David wrote a love letter to the Pebble community, which blossomed into Rebble, the service that keeps Pebbles ticking today, despite the company's demise in 2016. When he's not hacking on wearables, David can probably be found building a companion bot, experimenting with machine learning, growing his ever-increasing collection of dev boards, or hacking on DOS-based palmtops from the 90s.

Find David on Mastodon at @ishotjr@chaos.social or these other places.

View more articles by David Groom

As useful as the venerable Uno can be for many projects, when makers need more IO, more power, moreโ€ฆeverything, they typically find themselves reaching for the beefier, connector-laden Arduino Mega. At least they might haveโ€ฆuntil the announcement of the new GIGA R1 WiFi, the most powerful Arduino board for makers.

Built on the Megaโ€™s familiar form factor, the GIGA dwarfs the power of its cousin with a dual-core Cortexยฎ-M7 + Cortexยฎ-M4 microcontroller, which allows two Arduino sketches to run concurrently on a single board โ€“ or one traditional sketch, plus a MicroPython script.

Despite the common layout, the GIGA increases the Megaโ€™s pin count to a mind-blowing 76, including 12 analog, 13 PWM, 4 serial ports, 3 I2C, 2 SPI, 1 FDCAN, and 1 SAI. This, plus USB-C, USB-A (host), and a 3.5mm audio jack makes the GIGA a veritable playground for music projects, HID (human interface device), machine learning/vision, robotics, and more.

We were lucky enough to receive a GIGA to play with before release, so look out for hands-on reactions and full reviews soon. In the meantime, you can pick up the Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi directly from Arduino, as well as view the datasheet for complete details on this incredible new board.

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By David Groom

David Groom

David bought his first Arduino in 2007 as part of a Roomba hacking project. Since then, he has been obsessed with writing code that you can touch. David fell in love with the original Pebble smartwatch, and even more so with its successor, which allowed him to combine the beloved wearable with his passion for hardware hacking via its smartstrap functionality. Unable to part with his smartwatch sweetheart, David wrote a love letter to the Pebble community, which blossomed into Rebble, the service that keeps Pebbles ticking today, despite the company's demise in 2016. When he's not hacking on wearables, David can probably be found building a companion bot, experimenting with machine learning, growing his ever-increasing collection of dev boards, or hacking on DOS-based palmtops from the 90s.

Find David on Mastodon at @ishotjr@chaos.social or these other places.

View more articles by David Groom
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