Last week at the World Maker Faire New York, the co founder of the Arduino project, Massimo Banzi took stage to unveil a pair of new IoT boards with embedded LoRa and GSM capabilities, the long-range radio (LoRa)-equipped MKR WAN 1300 and the cellular-capable MKR GSM 1400.
The Arduino MKR WAN 1300 and MKR GSM 1400 are designed to offer a practical and cost-effective solution for developers, makers and enterprises, enabling them to quickly add connectivity to their projects and ease the development of battery-powered IoT edge applications.
The boards come in with the smaller MKR form factor that Arduino has been utilizing of late, measuring 67.64 x 25mm. The company says they also offer low power consumption, making them useful for applications such as environmental monitoring, tracking, agriculture, energy monitoring and home automation.
Like the MKR WAN 1300, the Arduino MKR GSM 1400 is based on the SAM D21, but integrates a u-blox module for global 3G communications. The board features automatic power switching, however, it uses either a 3.7V LiPo battery or an external Vin power source delivering 5V to 12V. While the USB port can also be used to supply 5V to the board, the MKR GSM 1400 is able to run with or without the battery connected.
(SOURCE: MAKEZINE)
The MKR GSM 1400 provides a rich set of I/O interfaces including: eight digital I/Os; 12 PWM outputs; UART, SPI and I2C interfaces; analog I/O including seven inputs and one output; and eight external interrupt pins.
In addition to the release of the new boards, Banzi stressed Arduino’s renewed commitment to open source, and their dedication to the community, especially to developers and educators.
A new update will help you keep sensitive information in your code secure even after you upload and share it. Using “SECRET_” before a value will automatically blank it out when you share the code, so you can keep API keys and tokens to yourself.
Banzi also announced that starting on October 10, they will be hosting a monthly “hangout” with the dev community, in an effort to better engage with makers and with the Arduino User Group (AUG). Next year, in February 2018, Banzi and other stakeholders will meet to discuss the Arduino Foundation and how to best move forward with it. The Arduino Foundation was announced a year ago at Maker Faire New York 2016.
