Why the New Arduino Uno R4 Will Be a Game-Changer for Makers | Hacker News Reader

Why the New Arduino Uno R4 Will Be a Game-Changer for Makers

makeuseof.com

14 pointsteleforce11 comments

"The WiFi version will be equipped with an Espressif S3 Wi-Fi module, " - essentially, what they are calling the Wifi module is also an ESP32-S3 with dual xtensa cores running at 240 Mhz !

For a MCU running at 48Mhz - the "wifi module" is a dual core 240Mhz SOC :-). What a wild world we live in !

Very strange indeed.

Even the popular Nordic Bluetooth nRF has a built-in small microcontroller that can be used for limited signal processing standalone without the help from external processor.

They might as well get rid of the ARM core and use only the more powerful ESP32-S3 as the main dual core or alternatively the open source RISC-V single core with the ESP32-C3. This should drive the overall price and power consumption even further.

It is what it is, and the connected R4 version with Wi-Fi module is considered a more "premium" version of the Uno.

I find it quite funny. There are some benefits to having wifi on its own chip doing its own thing so it doesn't interfere with timing on your main code, the downside being more complex code to get it all working.

But it's still funny that the wifi chip is many times faster and arguably a much more capable microprocessor (the exception probably being analog inputs).

Also ESP32-S3 has all the features which they are advertising - CAN bus and USB.

I'm pretty sure Arduino already sold better boards based on Atmel SAMD for years (the Zero and various Nanos). Also, Arduino is not the only game in town. I recently bought two Nucleo G431KBs; it costed me less than a single Uno R3, they are more powerful than this R4, and they are supported by their IDE.

> Also, Arduino is not the only game in town. I recently bought two Nucleo G431KBs...

ST's development boards are great. They're fairly inexpensive, especially in the Nucleo line; they cover an extremely wide range of microcontrollers; they come with real debug probes, not just serial ports; and many of them have Arduino-compatible pinouts and/or are supported by the Arduino IDE. Plus, they've got their own Eclipse-based IDE which you can graduate to once you've outgrown the Arduino framework.

Well if you can actually buy STM32 processors for final product.

Ouch. We switched to GigaDevice GD32 last year for exactly this reason.

For a lot of hobbyist projects, the development board is the final product. Not everything goes into mass production.

It depends on the product range. G0s and G4s seems to be available on mouser.

> "SRAM went from 2kB to 32kB, and flash memory went from 32kB to 256kB to accommodate more complex projects."

Yawn!

I can get an ESP32-based clone that can be programmed with arduino libraries with more available Flash and RAM for a fraction of whatever they're going to sell this for. What's the value proposition for this Uno R4?

At this point I've pretty much transitioned to doing everything with ESPs anyway.

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