Meet the Arduino Due, the 32-bit board that’ll let your projects fly (really)

Meet the Arduino Due, the 32bit board thatll let your projects fly really

As much as we love the Arduino Uno, it’s not the most powerful of hobbyist microcontrollers. Fortunately, the folks in Turin have just put the finishing touches on a 32-bit upgrade with buckets of potential. At the heart of the Arduino Due is an 84MHz Atmel CPU, based on ARM’s Cortex M3 Architecture, which is capable of being the brains inside your own flying drone or homemade 3D printer. It should start trickling out onto shelves from today, setting you back $49, but hey, that’s a small price to pay to automate your drinking adventures.

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Meet the Arduino Due, the 32-bit board that’ll let your projects fly (really) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Oct 2012 09:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Raspberry Pi’s new turbo mode boosts performance by roughly 50 percent, doesn’t void warranties

Raspberry Pi's new turbo mode boosts performance by roughly 50 percent, doesn't void warranties

Giving a Raspberry Pi extra voltage is a quick way to squeeze out additional processing power and void its warranty, but the folks behind the tinker-friendly board have devised a turbo mode that boosts performance by roughly 50 percent while keeping warranties intact. After studying the effects of temperature and voltage on the hardware’s lifespan, the team found that dynamic overclocking and overvolting doesn’t affect the Pi’s health appreciably. As a result, speeds can be pushed from 700MHz to 1GHz only when additional horsepower is needed, and things are reined back in when the CPU grazes 185 degrees Fahrenheit (85 degrees Celsius). Benchmarks show the extra computing oomph makes the Pi 52 percent faster on integer, 64 percent speedier on floating point and 55 percent snappier on memory tasks. The new mode is available in the latest firmware update, which also includes temperature and frequency widgets, better analog audio, improved USB performance and support for WiFi dongles out of the box. For the technical nitty-gritty and more details on the upgrade, hit the source link below.

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Raspberry Pi’s new turbo mode boosts performance by roughly 50 percent, doesn’t void warranties originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Sep 2012 05:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Digispark, Arduino’s unofficial kid brother, takes Kickstarter by storm (video)

Digispark, the quartersized Arduino board takes Kickstarter by storm

Hobbyist Erik Kettenburg was concerned that the size and cost of Arduino stifled his ability to craft, so he set about developing Digispark. It’s an Arduino-compatible board, the size of a quarter, that offers a few pins at around a third of the cost of an Uno — so you don’t have to worry about taking projects apart when you’re done. Designed to be fully compatible with the Italian standard, it’s packing six I/O pins, 8k memory and a full USB connection amongst other things. The aim is to retail the gear for $12 a piece, and has been so popular that it’s made nearly $100,000 in Kickstarter pledges, smashing its original goal of $5,000. We’ve got video for you below, and you can still throw some cash Mr. Kettenburg’s way if you fancy getting your hands on one quickly.

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Digispark, Arduino’s unofficial kid brother, takes Kickstarter by storm (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Aug 2012 09:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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