>> INTEL AND ARDUINO TEAM UP TO BRING ARDUINO 101 TO MARKET

It is always exciting to see new hardware being announced - especially if it is a new Arduino!

During the Opening Conference at Maker Faire Rome, Josh Walden of Intel and Massimo Banzi of Arduino, announced the upcoming release of the Arduino 101 board. The board features a 32-bit Intel® Quark™ microcontroller for minimal power consumption, 384kB of flash memory, 80kB of SRAM (24kB available for sketches), an integrated DSP sensor hub, Bluetooth Low Energy radio, and a 6-axis combo sensor with accelerometer and gyroscope.

The module contains two tiny cores, an x86 (Quark) and an ARC, both clocked at 32Mhz. It comes with 14 digital input/output pins (4 can be used as PWM), 6 analog inputs, a USB connector for serial communication and sketch upload, a power jack, an ICSP header with SPI signals and I2C dedicated pins. Best of all; it is the same form factor as the Arduino UNO.

In other-words; it provides everything one expects to be an Arduino friendly target for developers.

It will be interesting to see to what level the SDK allows developers to tinker with all the nice features built into this board - the bluetooth chip is an nRF51822 which also comes with a lot of interesting functionality that hopefully are not abstracted within the Arduino environment.