Playing around with the Arduino Uno R4 Minima, Uno R4 Wifi and Uno Q

Playing around with the Arduino Uno R4 Minima, Uno R4 Wifi and Uno Q

Stepping up to a new level of micro-controller 

 

 Thanks to the fine people at Arduino, specifically Per Tillisch, an Arduino Support Engineer, I just received some free hardware! An Uno R4 Minima, Uno R4 WiFi and Uno Q!

 

Uno R4 Wifi and Uno R4 Minima

 

Now its just a matter of figuring out what to do with this stuff. I've already begun testing with the RF24 Communication Stack, and most of it works out-of-the-box. The only change required was adjusting the CPU speed detection in RF24Ethernet to accommodate the Uno R4 Wifi and Uno R4 Minima. I've put the changes in, but haven't done a release yet. Users can download the ZIP or clone the repo to install for now.

 

The R4 Minima appears pretty straight forward, with a micro-controller attached to a familiar board type, and a lot more processing power and memory than previous AVR-based designs. Not that the AVR boards are no longer useful, but its nice playing around with the newer designs and architecture. Newer boards actually tend to have a simpler interface when getting into direct register access and control, so its easier to develop libraries and applications that work with the newer boards. The R4 WiFi is more complex, with a main MCU, the Renesas RA4M1, and an ESP32 handling WiFi with a bridge between the MCUs.

 

Now I've played around with the Arduino Q quite a bit already, so will be mostly focusing on understanding and working with these new R4 boards that I have no experience with. I've gotten them working with the RF24 Comm stack as mentioned above, so it will probably be onto the AutoAnalogAudio library, to see what can be accomplished. The Arduino Q runs Linux along with the MCU, with a Serial bridge between them, but these boards are quite different. They seem to be more comparable to regular MCUs, just with enhanced functionality.

 

The boards themselves came with no strings attached, Arduino folks just sent them for free, so I can pretty much do whatever I want, with whatever time frame I want. 

 

Of course the big difference is that the R4 WiFi has an embedded ESP32 chip for WiFi in addition to the main micro-controller, so I will need some time to understand the bridge interface and whether it is worth it to explore programming the ESP32 chip directly. At first I will focus on the Renesas RA4M1 chip and explore its main capabilities, leaving the rest for later.

 

A big thanks to Arduino for these boards!