We’ve just released a new revision of the Arduino USB board – named “Diecimila” to celebrate the fact that there are now over 10,000 Arduino board in existence. The Arduino Diecimila includes a number of improvements over the previous revision of the USB board, the NG, including:

• the Diecimila can be automatically reset from software, meaning that you no longer need to physically press the reset button on the board before you upload a sketch,
• there’s a new low-dropout power regulator, so the board can run with a minimum input voltage of 6V instead of 7V, meaning that you can power it with 4 AA’s (don’t give it more than 12V, though, unless, as Gianluca says, you want to cook eggs on it),
• we’ve added a couple of pin headers: one providing a regulated 3.3 volts, and the other making the boards reset line available (e.g. to make it easier to add a reset button to a shield),
• a fuse provides overcurrent protection for your computer’s USB ports (while most computers have built-in protection, this provides an extra layer of safety),
• the board should start up without problems when powered from an external power supply (the NG required a bit of fiddling to get this working)

To get the automatic reset working, we needed to make a bunch of modifications to the Arduino software. You’ll want to grab Arduino 0009 from the download page. To get started with the Diecimila, see the instructions for your operating system: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux.

The Diecimila should be available from most Arduino distributors; see the buy page to find the one closest to you.

Update: corrected description of the low-dropout regulator (thanks Limor!).

Categories:Hardware

• 
• Tweet
• 

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.