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The next Arduinos have been announced, the Arduino Uno & Arduino Mega 2560. The major difference is that it's equipped with a USB chip which can be reprogrammed to act like different USB devices like a keyboard, mouse or similar, and the Mega has twice as much memory.

What would you like to do with the new boards?

My plans are to make a keyboard/mouse replacement for playing certain games. Press a button to quickly & repeatedly click the left mouse button type thing.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I'm not going to - but I expect PSGroove for Arduino Uno to appear any day now \$\endgroup\$
    – Toby Jaffey
    Commented Sep 27, 2010 at 21:40

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Re: Arduino Uno

I'm a huge fan of the USB-AVRs. Last year I built an AT90USB162 board. Since then, I've been working on a single chip Bus Pirate clone on one and using them to build USB connected test jigs for our production line.

I also love Arduino.

I had hoped that the Arduino Uno would combine the two chips. But, I'm disappointed. My advice - wait for v1.1 (Uno punto uno?) (see @reemrevnivek below).

Looking at the Uno schematic, they haven't connected up most of the pins from the ATmegaU8 (not even out to pads). So, lots of interesting LUFA stuff won't work without big changes (JTAG, AVR programming, SD cards as mass storage, etc)

There are two lines connecting the ATmegaU8 to the ATmega328 - meant for a serial link.

My advice, buy a Teensy. If the Arduino users start coding for ATmegaU8 it'll run better on Teensy's ATmegaU4 and have acres of flash and RAM left. With the DFU/HID bootloader in the ATmega8, things must be very tight indeed.

PS. ATmegaU8 as FTDI replacement for Arduino - see Benito and Uno response.

PPS. Here's the FAQ. The U8 is a cost down.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I was excited about it for a minute, but, after looking at the schematic, I agree. Here's hoping that fixing this is part of their plan: (1) Sell boards with missing connections. (2) Profit. (3) Announce that boards with missing connections can't do X, Y, or Z. (4) Sell V2 boards with connections properly implemented. (5) Profit again. \$\endgroup\$
    – Kevin Vermeer
    Commented Sep 27, 2010 at 22:32
  • \$\begingroup\$ Cunning\0\0\0\0 \$\endgroup\$
    – Toby Jaffey
    Commented Sep 27, 2010 at 23:07
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    \$\begingroup\$ Well, it's all open source. You can always make a derivative board that makes all the connections you like. The main goal of Arduino is to be an easy, welcoming platform for folks new to hardware hacking, though. JTAG, etc. doesn't really advance that goal. If you're looking for more power or more involved USB hacking, you probably want to look at the Netduino or something similar. \$\endgroup\$
    – phooky
    Commented Sep 27, 2010 at 23:28
  • \$\begingroup\$ +1 Agreed, Arduino is for hardware hacking. On that basis, it's inexcusable to not bring out the lines. Even to vias! \$\endgroup\$
    – Toby Jaffey
    Commented Sep 27, 2010 at 23:54
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It seems there are issues with the quality of the Arduino Uno's ...

Arduino Uno Quality Control

to: The Arduino Opensource Community

and a hardware bug in the Arduino design ...

Arduino Hardware Bug

After looking into the design, it seems to us that the circuit is just fundamentally flawed, and there is little reason to expect it to work well regardless of which MOSFET is used. The newer MOSFET makes the problem more evident, so it is easily verifiable in all kinds of tests. (These were not just contrived tests: on the one laptop we tried, we measured almost 200mA flowing into the USB port after powering it off. We verified that this occurred across the entire recommended operating range of 7-12V on VIN.) The new Arduino Uno looks like it will have the same basic problem, but we have not tried one yet.

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