Bay Area Makerfaire 2015: The Arduino Zero has finally arrived after months of waiting! During his "State of Arduino" speech at the Bay Area Maker Faire 2015, Arduino founder Massimo Banzi ammounced that the first batch of Arduino Zero boards would begin shipping on June 9th. This is the first major Arduino board launch since the company announced that it would be partnering with Adafruit to launch its new "Genuino" brand. For those of you unfamiliar with the Arduino Zero, it's a new development board designed to power Arduino into the future, specifically to provide a development platform for the IoT, wearables, and automation. It's Arm Cortex M0+ core is powerful and much faster than the Uno's 8-bit microcontroller. 

From Arduno.cc

The Arduino Zero is a simple and powerful 32-bit extension of the platform established by Arduino UNO. The Zero board aims to provide creative individuals with the potential to realize truly innovative ideas for smart IoT devices, wearable technology, high-tech automation, crazy robotics, and projects not yet imagined. The board is powered by Atmel’s SAMD21 MCU, which features a 32-bit ARM Cortex® M0+ core.

The Zero board expands the Arduino family by providing increased performance to fuel the creativity of the maker community. The flexible feature set enables endless project opportunities for devices and acts as a great educational tool for learning about 32-bit application development. One of its most important feature is Atmel’s Embedded Debugger (EDBG), which provides a full debug interface without the need for additional hardware, significantly increasing the ease-of-use for software debugging. EDBG also supports a virtual COM port that can be used for device programming and traditional Arduino boot loader functionality.

Arduino Zero's Specifications:

• Microcontroller: ATSAMD21G18, 48pins LQFP
• Operating Voltage: 3.3V
• Digital I/O Pins: 14, with 12 PWM and UART 
• Analog Input Pins: 6, 12-bit ADC channels
• Analog Output Pins: 1, 10-bit DAC
• DC Current per I/O Pin: 7 mA
• Flash Memory: 256 KB
• SRAM: 32 KB
• EEPROM: up to 16KB by emulation
• Clock Speed: 48 MHz

Watch Massimo's full talk at the Bay Area Maker Faire courtsy of Make.

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