NEW Arduino Uno R4 Boards – Minima & WiFi

Two new Arduino Uno boards – the Minima and WiFi. Let’s examine them and test some of their unique features, including the CAN Bus and LED Matrix.

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The Arduino Uno R3 was released in 2011. It has become the most popular maker and experimenter microcontroller board today, thanks to its ease of use and open-source design that allowed several low-cost “clones” to be made available.

Now, after a dozen years, Arduino has updated the Uno. Actually, they did make a WiFi Uno in 2018, but nobody noticed, and there was a “mini” collectors edition Uno in 2021. But this update is so big they made it into two boards!

Arduino has released the low-cost (20.00 USD) Uno R4 Minima and the full-featured Uno R4 WiFi boards (27.50 USD). These boards are pin-for-pin compatible with the older Uno R3 and are also 5-volt logic devices, rare these days. This means compatibility with your existing shields and prototyping boards.

The new boards are powered by the Renesas RA4M1 microcontroller, running at 48 MHz. This provides an emulation of the ATMega328P used in the original board and also adds new features, several that we will test out today.

Among the new features we will try out are the following:

12-bit DAC – We’ll generate a sine wave with a library that makes it very easy.
CAN Bus connection – We’ll connect 2 Minima boards using a CAN Bus.
WiFi Access Point – We’ll build an Access Point with a web page to control an LED.
LED Matrix Display – We’ll use the online Matrix Editor to create patterns.

We’ll also run benchmark tests on these boards and compare them to the older Uno R3, as well as a few other popular microcontroller boards.

Here is the Table of Contents of today’s video:

00:00 – Introduction
01:41 – Arduino Uno R4 Boards
13:10 – Boot & 8mA Current Limitation
15:27 – Arduino R4 IDE Setup
16:40 – DAC & Sine Wave Hookup
18:21 – DAC – Sine Wave Code
20:28 – DAC – Sine Wave Demo with scope
21:37 – CAN Bus Explainer & Hookup
30:50 – CAN BUS Code – canwrite
32:28 – CAN BUS Code – canread
33:29 – CAN BUS Demo – 2 Minimas
35:11 – Uno R4 WiFi & ESP32
38:19 – WiFi Access Point Code
42:19 – WiFi Access Point Demo
43:19 – LED Matrix Explainer
46:18 – LED Live Preview Code
47:52 – LED Live Preview Online Edit & Demo
49:44 – Benchmarking Setup & Code
52:19 – Benchmark Test Results
54:56 – Conclusion

These are two unique boards, certain to interest experimenters and educators (the LED matrix opens up a lot of interesting classroom displays).

Hope you enjoy the video!

Bill

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