Review of the New Arduino Uno R4 WiFi - Is It Time to Upgrade?

hello guys this is Paul mcarter with toptechboy dcom and we're here today with my review of the allnew Arduino Uno R4 WiFi so what I'm going to need you guys to do is pour yourself a nice tall glass of ice cold coffee that would be straight up black coffee poured over ice no sugar no sweeteners none needed and I'm going to need you guys to buckle up because we have got a really incredible show for you today so what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be telling you my reaction to the new Arduino R4 WiFi I've had this thing for about three weeks and I've been playing with it and I'm going to share my experience with you and share my thoughts with you so you guys get ready because we have got some really exciting stuff to talk about but let's start by going back and talking about our old favorite the Ard doino Uno R3 now the R3 board came out in 2010 I got one back then and so I've been basically playing around with this board for about the last 14 years if you can believe that now this board really became the standard it became the foundation of the entire industry of single board computers and there's some just really incredible things about this R3 board that allowed it to become the standard the first thing was is that it was really simple beginner friendly all right before if you were going to work with a microcontroller you were probably working with some custom hardware and you were devel uh working with some custom software so you really had to be a subject matter expert something that was really different about the Arduino R3 it was designed to be user friendly beginner friendly so you had a standard Hardware platform this board the Arduino Uno R3 and then they wrapped around that a very simple Arduino IDE or integrated development environment and programming language so the development environment the hardware and the uh software the operating system were all standard and what that meant was it meant that it was userfriendly a new user could learn it because it was userfriendly and because a home hobbyist could learn it and use it very quickly you developed a huge user base you went from the user Community not working with microprocessors very much to where almost everyone begin to work with it so they developed a very huge user base because there was a huge user base for the Arduino Uno R3 there was a lot of components that were developed for it so all of the sudden there was just this huge array of sensors and actuators and motors and servos and any type of component that you could imagine that those components were developed for the uh for the Arduino and so that then made it even more popular it became even more of a standard because not only was there a standard Hardware platform but there was a a huge number of components that you could hook to it now because there was a huge number of components that hooked to it very quickly a large set of very mature software libraries developed around it so if you got your uino and you've got a component to hook to it very likely you could find a very welldeveloped library to connect that component to your Arduino now with this extensive mature software base and this standard Hardware platform and because it was a very uh you know a very popular board very quickly a very large user Community developed around it and it was a user community that was very friendly so if you were working on a project with the Arduino R3 and you had a problem you could go to like the Arduino forums and very likely you would find that somebody else had already had the same problem you had and you could find the solution that they used or if it was a new problem you could post your problem on the forums and the people on the forums were very friendly they were very friendly to beginners and so beginners were sort of helped into the field and so you had a very a very friendly user base develop around the Arduino Uno now the other thing that happened as a result of all those things it became a very stable platform and what do I mean by a stable platform well the hardware is the Uno Arduino Uno R3 the integrated development environment for years and years and years was 1.8 and then uh not too long ago they went to version 2.1 but there weren't any real changes in it a program that you had uh written in 2010 would work here in 2014 it was very stable and because of that stability a lot of educational resources developed around the Arduino now what do I mean by that okay let me give you a counter example another board that I love is the Nvidia Jetson series of boards these are just incredible super computers as a single board computer and I went in and I developed some educational resources based on these Jets and uh these Nvidia Jets and boards but what happened these have an operating system jetpack that sits on top of Linux that uh then has different versions of open CV and different versions of tensorflow and different versions of all of these different software packages and what I found happened is before I finished the class before I finished making the lessons they were already Obsolete and people were writing in the comments on my uh educational videos hey when I install this I get this error because the versions were changing faster than what I could keep up with them and so when things change that quickly it discourages the educational Community from develop developing educational resources because they know that within a month or two all that work that you that they put in on those videos those videos would become obsolete because the software and the libraries were going forward so quickly not so with the the Arduino R3 it was stable they weren't going in and changing the hardware changing the software and so it gave Educators a chance to go in develop and develop good educational resources now I hope what you can see is is this created sort of a virtuous cycle that the better the educational resources the more people that used it the more people that used it the more components that were developed the more components that were developed the more software libraries that came along and so this thing just ramped up over the last 14 or so years to where it's just become absolutely the standard in single board computers now you guys know that recently I've been doing a lot of work on the Raspberry Pi Pico W and I indeed love that board and I'm doing educational resources on that board but when I look at my channel every day I have about 10,000 people take one of my lessons on the Arduino take the Arduino class I have 10,000 people a day engaging with those videos if you look at my series on the Raspberry Pi Pico w i get about 2,000 people a day interact with those videos and if you look at my series on the Raspberry Pi itself it gets about 1,500 uh uh people interacting with the videos a day so you can see that the Arduino platform is five times the Arduino platform user blit or interest is five times as much as it is for something like the Raspberry Pi Pico W and so then that just shows you the popularity of this of this platform so now over the years there were a few new Arduino boards that came out one that I really liked was the Arduino Nano and the thing about the Arduino Nano it was pretty much identical to the Arduino Uno it was just in a smaller form factor and it had the mail pin coming out the bottom so you could actually plug it into the breadboard and make something that was a little bit easier to prototype with so yeah if I was doing things on the desktop I would use the Uno R3 and then if I wanted to make a real prototype I would switch it over to the uh Arduino Nano but everything was pretty much identical anything that you developed on this platform could be moved over to the Arduino the Arduino Nano so with all of that glowing report that I'm giving on the Arduino R3 why am I looking at and why am I contemplating the new Arduino R4 well in the 15 years that I was working with the R3 there were basically three uh issues that I had with it I won't say complaints but there were three kind of walls that I ran into and let me switch over here and kind of talk to you about those okay and I'll get out of your way now and basically I could go through pages and pages and pages and hundreds of specifications about what chipset what board what this what that but I want to kind of uh uh condense it down to something simple of the things that were really important for me and basically the three issues that I had over the years with the R3 were number one sometimes it wasn't fast enough now in the areas that it wasn't fast enough was usually when I was trying to develop realtime control signals where you would take a measurement and then apply a signal somewhere else so where you were trying to like let's say keep a platform level by adjusting a stepper motor based on readings you were getting from an IMU something that had to read and actuate very very quickly that there were some cases where the speed of the Arduino R3 was not enough for what I was trying to do it was a limit liation the second thing and that was probably I would say the most minor limitation I could usually find a way around that but the bigger limitation was the memory of 32 KOB uh kilobits on the uh on the R3 and that actually came up to be a limitation quite often for me because if you're going to use a sensor with the Arduino usually you've got a load of library and sometimes those libraries took up a lot of space and so if I wanted to let's say I want to hook a GPS and an IMU and a pressure sensor all up to the Arduino I would very often start coming up against that memory uh that memory limit and then I was forced to try to figure out ways around it so that memory did actually show up to be a limitation but probably the biggest limitation that I had was the issue of connectivity that the connectivity to the Arduino R3 was pretty much through the USB cable which meant that that USB cable that comp Port sort of tethered you down to the desktop and it was very hard to have really remote type of applications now there were some things like the XB radios and you could try to wire something up they were pretty tricky to use they weren't really very easy or there were some like ethernet Shields that you could hook up to it but again those turned out to be somewhat uh cumbersome and somewhat difficult to use and so so bottom line is the three things that I saw that I found challenges with the Uno R3 were the speed the memory and the connectivity and that's why I was so excited to see the specs on the new Arduino R4 and that was first of all the speed was a lot greater like that that's like what three times as fast and when you're doing something like a real-time P controller that 3x Improvement and performance turns out to be something that that really benefits your project then you can see we went from 32 kilobits to 256 kilobits that's almost a 10x increase in the amount of memory and for anything that I could imagine that 256 kilobits is going to be enough to do whatever it is that I'm going to want to do and then finally on connectivity what we have with the Arduino Uno R4 WiFi is it has built in wifi and so when I look look at this guys it really kind of comes down on paper to just being a slam dunk it is time to upgrade in my mind now the one other thing that I should say is uh what's really good about this board compared to some of the other boards that came out in the past is this is almost 100% backwards compatible so almost any software that you have developed for the R3 is going to run on the r four or just you might have to make some very minor tweaks and things like that but this really they did a very good job in maintaining backwards compatibility on this uh on this new board and so uh that's you know that's one of the other reasons that made me really excited about this so uh like I say I've played around with this for the last three weeks and I have made the decision to move forward so bottom line is what I am going to do you know my uh original Arduino R3 videos were very very popular my educational material was very very popular I've had millions of people take that series of Arduino classes but it's really time for me to remake my Arduino lessons first of all I have a much a much nicer Studio better lighting better microphone sometimes I'm a little embarrassed when I look back at those lessons of the you know the audio quality and the video quality was not that great the content was great but my Studio was not that great so it's really time for me to remake those uh Arduino lessons I think it was about four years ago that I made that last series it's time for me to remake them and what I've decided to do is I am going to remake them based on the Arduino R4 wifi now you might say well how about the Arduino R4 uh uh Minima you know guys if you want to take this next series of lessons with the R4 Minima most of the things in the class you'll be able to do but understand I'm going to be using that Wi-Fi so I really really encourage you to Shell out the several extra coins that it will take you to get the uh the Wi-Fi version of the board because I'm going to be probably working on this class for a year and so there's going to be some really really great content coming along okay also in the class what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be using the sunfounder elite Explorer kit and I've got a link down in the description so you can hop over to Amazon and you can pick up the identical Hardware to what I am going to be using now I got to tell you guys this is not just another one of the standard uh another one of the standard kits that's got the same old components in it it has some really really exciting new stuff and I'll be talking to you a little bit about some of that showing you how this kid has taken things to the next level and it has some stuff that we haven't been able to do in the uh you know with the with the earlier kits that uh that had uh uh that that we had played played around with so well worth uh well worth getting that kit and like I say I'll be showing you some of the power of that kit a little bit later in this uh in this video okay well let's just jump in and let's play around with this a little bit I'm ready to uh I'm ready to play around with this I think I'm ready to play around with this maybe I'm not ready to play around with this I think I'm ready to play around with this so you notice that I have upgraded to the Arduino IDE 2.2.1 I really loved 1.8 and there were a lot of things I liked a lot better about 1.8 than 2.2.1 but I'm going to go ahead and go to it because I know that this set of classes might be used by people for the next four or five years so I don't want to start it on an old version of the IDE which might get deprecated along the way so we are going to go ahead and we're going to move to 2.2 .1 and so let's just call this thing up and uh one of the things that you notice here is for the R4 you just see your friendly bare minimum that you've gotten very uh that you've gotten very familiar with and so there's no big surprises here and so let's just write a simple program to show you that you can be comfortable that this new R4 is much like our old friend the R3 so let me come over here and give you a little bit of an overhead view little bit of an overhead view and we're going to come in and plug this in and what you see is we get the happy little Arduino noise that your computer has uh found uh has found that uh found that new component we're going to come in and we are on comp 5 and I'm also going to come in and make sure we've got the right board selected so I'm going to select the R4 Wi-Fi which I've got and then let's write our first little program so what we are going to do is we're going to be interacting with our old friend GPI pin 13 so what do I need to do I need to do a pin mode on which pin 13 and then it is going to be a what an output pen and then I've got to get in the habit again of putting our friend the semicolon at the end of the comments I've been doing micropython for so long it's going to take me a little time to get used to doing that again and then what we're going to come down here is we know from the R3 same as with the R3 this little LED right here is connected to pin 13 so what can I do I can do a digital write and I can digital write pin 13 and I can digital write it high like that and then I need to remember my semicolon and then we're going to run this thing and it takes a longer on uh 2.2.1 it seems like it like compiles everything every time and boom you see the LED come on and so we are you know kind of like just like we were on the R3 you'll be very comfortable with this uh uh with this new uh with this new board but the question is can we do something more interesting can we do something more interesting and again I want to kind of tweak your interest in this sunfounder kit and I don't want to go through the typical unboxing look we've got this component that component what I want to do is I want to show you what is possible I want to show you what is possible with that uh with that with this kit and this shows you one of the projects that I've been working on for like maybe the next week and so let me switch over here and show this to you and it shows you some of the reasons that I really love this new kit so what I'm going to do is the first thing I want you to notice is there are no wires connected up to this and I also want you to know that I have a little onoff switch so what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn it on heads up be watching the cool little uh LED Matrix and I'm going to turn this thing on and whoa it lights up what does it say uno www.top techboy do.com uhhuh I Am Legend uhhuh and boom this thing is working so this is really pretty cool this is pretty cool this little LED Matrix and I had a lot of fun playing with it but oh wait the kit includes the uh the 1306 the SSD 1306 display and uh it says it's booting okay so I'm getting a little input here I'm getting a little input info from the uh from the display and then we'll give it just uh we'll give it just a second believe me there's a lot of stuff going on here as this thing is uh as this thing is booting so what uh what I want to show you is I want to show you okay look now it says it's ready and look it's given me its IP address so why did that take a few minutes to boot the Arduino R4 was connecting to my wifi okay so this thing is connected to the Wi-Fi so let's look at this what do we notice no what do we notice there are no cables connected to it so I am communicating with it by WiFi this thing do what does this thing do well let me go ahead and I've got to run a little piece of software over here and then what are we going to see happen boom look at this what do I see roll and Pitch now you guys that are taking my uh you guys that are taking my Raspberry Pi Pico class you're kind of familiar with the mpu 6050 and you're familiar with finding rle and you're familiar with finding pitch but what do we have now we're not limited to roll and Pitch but we have what yah how come because this IMU is not a 6axis IMU this is a 10 axis IMU and three of those new axises are the magnetometer so let's look at this thing I can roll to 1920 de I can roll the other way to 20° I can pitch a negative pitch nose uh the nose down or I can bring the nose up okay and so you see I've got roll and Pitch but what do I have now I have yah and so because I have the magnetometers I can actually use this as a compass and what I can see is I can see what direction I am pointing so now I have what I have roll I have pitch I have yaah now I want to show you one other thing here here I have another thing which is height and this height is relative to the top of the desk relative to the hop top of the desk so it's got a little noise in it it thinks it's one inch above one inch below couple of inches here a couple of inches there but if I lift this thing all the way up you can't see it but what am I reading I'm reading about 25 in up here which is about right or if I put it on the floor let me give it a second to stabilize this there and I'm reading minus 32 in which would be about right and then I bring it back up here to the desktop and it'll probably take it a second to get back to saying that this is at uh within a couple of inches within a couple of inches of the desktop so now how am I measuring height okay how am I measuring height what am I doing is I'm using that mysterious tenth axis on this component and what the tenth axis does is if you will we have air on top of us pressing down and pressing in on us all right and that air goes from right here where we are all the way up to about 200,000 ft so I have 200,000 ft of air pressing down on me and pressing down on this component okay if I lift this component up by say 20 inches do I have the same amount of air pressing down no this two foot of air is now below me so what am I doing in effect what we are doing is we are weighing what we are in fact doing is I just had something strange happen with my lights give me just a second here okay that's good uh what we are doing here is we're weighing that column of air from the top of the pressure sensor up to 200,000 ft that weighs a certain amount when I lift it that air weighs less because now part of that air two foot out of the 200,000 ft of air is now below it and therefore I can detect that tiny minuscule amount of difference in the weight of the air between the top of the desk versus having it up here and that's why it's not exactly perfect that really you can see it's uh it's beginning to drift off a little bit but you can really get within you know about let's say about usually 10 in you can measure your height and this is actually how an altimeter works on an airplane but usually with an altimeter you're not trying to measure changes of inches but you're trying to measure changes of you know hundreds of feet or something like that but this just shows you the accuracy of what we're able to do with this component and so we are now measuring roll pitch and yaw and we're getting a measurement of height in there now the reason I love that is there's a lot of math and a lot of engineering that goes into this and I think you know by now I'm just not I'm not trying to teach you to code I'm trying to think teach you to think like an engineer so I really want to show you the math and I really want to show you the engineering behind making a component like this and not have you just come in and copy and paste my uh copy and paste my code all right now do you remember though this is why so what do you think this is connecting to okay so this data is not just connecting here to this display but this data is going out to my desktop PC and so I want to show you something that I think is pretty cool so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to switch over to this view all right so I need you guys to pay attention now and watch this so that's a little crooked I can't send that okay so let's switch over here and boom look at this what do I have I have a live animation of what is happening in my hand is the real device on the screen is the animated device and what the animated device is it's come alive and whatever is happening in the real world to this board is reflected in the virtual ual version of the board now how can I do that I can do that because I have WiFi and I can send the data from here to the desktop computer and then I wrote a Python program to do the animation now I haven't done this but what I could also do is I could add to the animation the up and down so that as I move the board up and down in the real world you would see the board in the an animation move up and down and so you can see I've got the yah I've got the roll I've got the pitch okay I've got the pitch and the roll working together and so I just think that that is pretty darn amazing so with this class that's coming up I got to tell you guys that really I never want to forget the beginning users so this class will start with the old turn the LED on and off and then it'll go through the binary numbers and it'll go go through the if statements and the for loops and all of those types of things you guys that have been with me a while already know that but you guys got to quit getting frustrated with that because you've got to remember you were a beginner at one point and I always want to go back to the absolute beginner so there's some little kid out there that wants to learn engineering he can get this kit and he's not going to get left behind but what I want you to see is be patient and we're going to get to some really exciting projects like this one ALS so like I said the kit the other thing so what are some things that that excite me about the kit it excites me that our IMU unit has 10 axes it excites me that we're using this uh this OLED this OLED 1306 that we've got that as part of the kit and that we've got instead of a six axis instead of a six AIS uh IMU we've got a 10 axis IMU now there's all types of incred ible other components in the uh in the kit uh we're going to be doing things with a stepper motor and we haven't done that before and we've got some uh some things with pumps and being able to move liquids around and so we've got a really really nice kit and like I say I've already made the first lesson for the new kit and so I would encourage you guys to join me on this journey look in the description down below and Order yourself uh order yourself one of these kits and then in the next week or two I'm actually going to start dropping uh dropping the lessons if you already know the beginner stuff just maybe you could tune in and answer questions help some of the beginners and then be patient because I promise you we are going to get to some really uh some really exciting projects on this thing okay guys I hope you're enjoying taking these classes as much as I am making them as always I want to say thank you to you guys who are helping me out over at patreon means a lot to me that you come alongside me and support me in that way you can also help me by giving me a thumbs up subscribe to the channel leave a comment down below all of those are good things but most importantly share this video with other people because the world needs more people doing coding and fewer people sitting around watching silly cat videos Paul mcarter with toptechboy do.com I will talk to you guys later

Channel: Paul McWhorter

Views: 15,703

Keywords: STEM, LiveStream, TopTechBoy

Id: oBrp29-NE9I

Length: 31min 23sec (1883 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 13 2024