Hello, Future: Exploring Arduino Uno R4 WIFI - Unboxing and Initial Review!

when working with Arduino there is one thing I fear the most that one day a new microcontroller not made by Arduino would come out and make all my work irrelevant but now with the release of new revision 4 Arduino Uno Boards called Minima and Wi-Fi that worry became much smaller at least for now these boards have made Arduino as good as other similar products when I heard about those microcontrollers I knew I had to get one of them I could have gone for Minima but I ordered a Wi-Fi version because of its extra features actually this board can arrive any moment now [Music] yep has arrived let's go and get it I got it let's go [Music] [Applause] so here is the parcel looking very different from the ones I received from AliExpress let's open it inside there is a smaller box let's take a closer look and here it is the microcontroller comes on a plastic stand this might come in handy and this is the actual microcontroller itself a new addition to my Arduino collection now let's quickly compare this Arduino revision for Wi-Fi with one of the Arduino Unos I already own immediately it strikes me that revision 4 board seems to be of much higher quality compared to the older version I might not be making a fair comparison though because I have never owned the original Arduino Uno revision 3 board it is clear that the Clone board wouldn't be as good in quality let's start by looking at power supply in revision 3 board we could power the microcontroller in four ways by using USB B type cable with the exact 5 volt input this type of cable is not commonly used nowadays mainly for certain printers next we can power Arduino through the DC jack socket with a voltage range of 6 to 20 volts the the board regulates this voltage down to stable 5 volts which is the working logic of Arduino Uno we can also power Arduino through Vin pen with the same voltage range and directly through 5 volts pin with the exact 5 volts input it's important to choose the right method depending on your power supply to ensure the Arduino Works safely and properly the powering options for revision 4 board are similar but there are some differences the older USB type B socket was replaced with the more commonly used USB type-c socket it still requires exact 5 volts input there is a change in the allowed voltage range for the DC jack socket now it can accept a voltage range from 6 to 24 volts the same voltage range also applies when powering the Arduino through Vin pin no changes when powering Arduino through 5 volt spin let's take a look at the central unit of both microcontrollers in the revision 3 board the central processing unit used is atmega328p which is a part of the popular AVR family this CPU has 8-bit architecture meaning it can process 8 Bits of data at the time the clock speed is 12 megahertz the Arduino revision 4 bolt utilizes Renaissance ra4m1 MCU this microcontroller features cortex M energy efficient core which is specifically designed for use with microcontrollers it has 32-bits architecture meaning it can process 32 bits of data at the time it operates at the higher clock speed of 48 megahertz while the Renaissance CPUs are capable of working at frequencies to up to 200 megahertz I heard that the clock speed was kept at 48 megahertz as a trade-off to keep the 5 volts logic of the new revision for Arduino Uno not sure how much truth is in that now to the most interesting part memory if you did a fair amount of projects you must have run into instabilities due to memory bottlenecks or outright messages when compiling that you have run out of memory revision 4 board should really help in those cases and it provides 256 kilobytes of flash memory compared to 32 kilobytes available in the previous revision 3 board this is a significant increase eight times larger than before the SRAM size which was 2 kilobytes in revision 3 board is now 32 kilobytes in revision 4. making it 16 times larger even the ee prom which stores non-volatile data has grown in size it is increased by a factor of 8 to 8 kilobytes with these memory upgrades the Arduino revision 4 provides more space for your code and data making it easier to work on complex projects without worrying about memory limitations now let's take a look at the pins on both boards even though the pin layout seems similar there are some notable differences both boards offer 14 digital pins that you can use out of these 14 pins six of them namely pins 3 5 6 9 10 and 11 are called pwm pins pwm stands for pulse width modulation which allows you to control things like brightness or speed in your projects however there is a catch in revision 4. the datasheet claims that all digital pins can be pwm but they suggest sticking to using just those six mentioned earlier using the other pins for pwm in complex programs might lead to unexpected Behavior or issues on both revision 3 and revision 4 boards digital pins 0 and 1 are used for serial communication they allow the board to send and receive data to and from other devices on the old Arduino Uno board there are two specific pins digital pins 2 and 3 which are capable of generating external interrupts on revision 4 board supposedly All Digital pins support Hardware interrupts but there is very little information about this in the data sheet this surprises me because for me this is one of the major improvements on number of occasions I found myself one interrupt routine shorts so I definitely will revisit this in one of my future videos to confirm which specific pins can be used with interrupts providing more clarity on this topic and then we also have five analog pins on both microcontrollers in both cases A4 and A5 pins are used for i2c communication there is one difference when it comes to analog pins on the revision 4 board a0 pin serves as a digital to analog converter this feature allows you to convert digital signals into analog signals which can be useful in projects like audio related application now we will talk about various types of connections to and from the board in revision 3 there was a single serial interface that you could use with digital pins d0 and D1 or USB type B Connection in revision 4 you have two independent serial interfaces one through digital pins and another through USBC connector these two interfaces can work separately from each other giving us more flexibility the boat also has the SPI interface this allows you to connect SPI components using digital pins d10 through D13 we already talked about i2c communication which can be established using dedicated i2c pins or analog pins A4 and A5 in revision 4 there is a new addition a built-in can module Khan stands for controller area network it complies with the Khan 2.0a and Khan 2.0 B standards there is a special Library provided to communicate with other can devices while I might not use it if you want to interface with the car or some industrial machines this option will be very useful when you look at the boat you might notice a mysterious connection with a name that sounds hard to remember but it's actually pronounced quick this quick connection refers to a quick and easy way to use i2c the quick connector on the Uno revision 4 Wi-Fi is connected to the secondary i2c bus please note that quick socket compatible modules are designed to function at the operating voltage of 3.3 volts with Arduino Uno revision 3 if we wanted to connect multiple i2c devices we had to set up i2c bus by connecting clock and data lines to Arduino pins A4 and A5 then we had to connect each device to those lines and provide Power from Arduino 5 volt and ground pins or external power supply this required four connections for each device which meant lots of soldering or using many jumper wires with the new revision 4 bolt we still have the options to connect components the same way or we can use this quick solution with a quick socket and quick wires we can establish the i2c bus by connecting Arduino to the first quick socket compatible device this first device has an output socket through which we can connect another device by doing this we can daisy chain several i2c modules making our lives much easier SparkFun has released several components that support this quick connection like temperature sensors RTC modules and OLED displays however some of these components can be a bit expensive like 19 OLED display so some people might prefer to wait until this type of connectivity becomes more common and affordable before using it now let's talk about the features that are only available on revision 4 Wi-Fi microcontroller the first one is the built-in LED matrix it's pretty noticeable since it's 12x8 in size the microcontroller comes with a dedicated library for the LED Matrix and the creators even provide an online tool to create pixel art and animations for it while I can't think of any practical use for this matrix it's a fun feature to experiment with as a hobbyist I can't wait to play with it and I will definitely make a follow-up video on this topic the revision 4 board comes with the pre-installed demo Matrix sketch upon delivery which looks like this I'll try to work on my own custom animation the next feature is the onboard esp32s3 module this module is like a separate small computer on its own the esp32 provides Wi-Fi capability allowing the board to connect to the internet at the maximum speed of 150 megabits per second it also supports Bluetooth low energy 5 standard connectivity enabling data transfer at the speed of 2 megabits per second the esp32 also acts as a serial Bridge which means it manages the connection between the board and your computer when you want to upload or download data you can interface directly with the ESP using the 3x2 header pins on the boat however you should be aware that the operating voltage for the esp32 is 3 volts if you decide to use this interface you need to be cautious as it might override the existing code for Renaissance interface both Wi-Fi and Minima versions have the built-in RTC module Uno revision 4 Wi-Fi has a vrtc PIN to keep the onboard RTC running even when the power supply is cut off to use this you have to apply a voltage between 1.6 to 3.6 volts to vrtc pin funny enough Minima doesn't have vrtc pin so it's RTC module won't maintain the current time when the microcontroller is turned off there is a dedicated library to use with this module this topic definitely deserves its own video which I will work on soon let's open Arduino IDE and try to connect to revision 4 module I quickly realized that it is not on the list of the available microcontrollers we have to edit we do it by going to board manager we need to find the right package to install here are some Renaissance entries but this is not what we are looking for here it is the installation lasts around 2 minutes now we can see that all boards that were there previously are in a separate folder and we have a dedicated folder for revision 4 devices Wi-Fi and Minima now that we have revision four microcontrollers installed in the Arduino IDE let's load the sample program and test if it works I'll choose the blank sketch to make the onboard LED blink to ensure we see the entire report during compilation and uploading let's enlarge the window and you can see that at first it looks very similar to the report you get on the old version but the new version provides additional progress information which was not present before upload finished and the onboard LED is blinking which confirms that the upload was successful for comparison here is the report you get when working with the old Uno board you can clearly see the significant differences in the available memory with a new version we are nearly done last but not least let's talk about the prices I can buy the old revision 3 board online for 31 cloned version on AliExpress will set you back six dollars the new revision 4 boards do not have cloned version yet so you have to spend 26 dollars for revision for Minima which is cheaper than the older version the Wi-Fi board costs 41 dollars which is quite a lot but it's understandable taking into account its extra features so all in all revision 4 boards have a fair price and they offer a good value for money what does the arrival of the new boards mean for the old Arduino Unos and Nanos are they going to disappear I don't think so the limited resources they offer are still good for most of the purposes I think both revision 3 and revision 4 boards are going to coexist for quite some time this brings us to the end of this video as always like and share my videos subscribe if you are not already a subscriber but also consider supporting my channel a video like this takes days to make as you can see here not to mention all the costs I need to incur to purchase the components I am creating tutorials for you can support my channel in various ways you can either go for YouTube channel membership or become my patreon or even send a small donation through PayPal any help would be greatly appreciated I will see you in my next video ciao [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Mario's Ideas

Views: 7,267

Keywords: Unboxing, review, UNO, Arduino, REV4, Revision 4, Minima, WIFI, LED matrix, RTC, ESP32, Tutorial, Comparison, Microcontroller, R4, renesas, r4, iot

Id: aw1I6JnSZRY

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 31 2023