Arduino Announces New Wireless Linux Board

Arduino Computers & Mobile Internet of Things Technology
Arduino Announces New Wireless Linux Board
The Arduino Yún
The Arduino Yún

Today, Arduino announced a new family of wireless products that combine the Arduino architecture with Linux. The Arduino  Yún is intended to be the first member of this new line of wifi products. Arduino expects the new board to bring the power of Linux with ease of use of Arduino.

From the Arduino Press Office, “Yún means ‘cloud’ in Chinese language as the purpose of this board to make it simple to connect to complex web services directly from Arduino.”

Developed in partnership with Boston-based automation engineers Dog Hunter, it’s basically a Leonardo (ATmega32U4) with an embedded wifi Linux board on the PCB, running Linino (MIPS Linux variant) to handle all those wordy text-based formats like XML and other HTTP transactions. You can program it via wifi, or by the usual USB cable. And they’ve also partnered with Temboo for one-stop API access to data from Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, FedEx, PayPal, and many more.

For $69 plus tax you get:

Technical specifications

  • Microcontroller ATmega32u4
    Operating Voltage 5V
    Input Voltage (recommended) 5V via microUSB or PoE 802.3af
    Input Voltage (limits) 6-20V
    Digital I/O Pins 14
    PWM Channels 7
    Analog Input Channels 6 (plus 6 multiplexed on 6 digital pins)
    DC Current per I/O Pin 40 mA
    DC Current for 3.3V Pin 50 mA
    Flash Memory 32 KB (ATmega32u4) of which 4 KB used by bootloader
    SRAM 2.5 KB (ATmega32u4)
    EEPROM 1 KB (ATmega32u4)
    Clock Speed 16 MHz

Embedded Linux machine

  • MIPS 24K processor operating at up to 400 MHz
    DDR2 32MB Ram and 8 MB SPI Flash
    Complete IEEE 802.11bgn 1×1 AP or router
    USB 2.0 host/device
    PoE compatible 802.3af
    MicroSD card support

Arduino is on a roll at Maker Faire Bay Area. Friday they announced a new Arduino robot, today the Arduino Yún wifi board — now you’ve got us wondering about Sunday, Massimo …

13 thoughts on “Arduino Announces New Wireless Linux Board

  1. Tim Oliver says:

    Want!

  2. Charlie Lesoine says:

    We’re putting the internet on things! And now we have things on the internet!

  3. Baxter says:

    I love the Arduino, but if I want Linux I can get a Raspberry Pi for less than half the price.

  4. Madox says:

    Might want to take a look at that confusing PoE compatible point…

  5. Dmitriy says:

    At that price it should have ARM, and more IO pins, IMO. As it is, WiFi chip probably has an order of magnitude more processing power than the microcontroller.

  6. engineer@mailinator.com says:

    For $70 wouldn’t one of those cheap android boards be a better deal? Much more resources and running linux on the main processor.

  7. Paul Beaudet says:

    I don’t think you folks really understand how cool this is. The raspberry pi doesn’t really lower the barrier to entry beyond price (no unified simplistic way to program and share) and you would have to add an Arduino or something else to it to do many more real time physically oriented projects. 35pi+35arduino=70…Except this comes in one package and works with the shields that I have!

  8. Ed says:

    This looks like a real win, as long as the Linux side is *very* accessible and hackable. >However<, I'm really disappointed that it's a 5V board. Most of the gizmos I'd be interested in connecting to it are 3.3V…keeping us in the wonderful world of level converters.

  9. Max Kingsbury says:

    A 16 MHz 8-bit micro running Linux? Sounds pretty damned underpowered.

    Also, next time you take fancy PR pictures, you should clean the PCB first. The flux looks nasty.

    1. Max Kingsbury says:

      Oops, I got confused about which part was running Linux. My bad.

      1. Paul Beaudet says:

        Maybe this was the 8-bit linux micro you were thinking of – http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bit. 2 hours to boot FTW!

  10. calinezul says:

    With little steps Arduino will become one of the most powerful provider for robotic components and kits. This is great since they base on idea of open-source for all projects. As we can see there are some new products in the range of Arduino http://www.intorobotics.com/tag/arduino/

  11. lp says:

    This board has the same CPU, flash,ram and architecture as Dragino ms14. Anyone know if there firmware is interchangeable?

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Andrew Terranova is an electrical engineer, writer and author of How Things Are Made: From Automobiles to Zippers. Andrew is also an electronics and robotics enthusiast and has created and curated robotics exhibits for the Children's Museum of Somerset County, NJ and taught robotics classes for the Kaleidoscope Enrichment in Blairstown, NJ and for a public primary school. Andrew is always looking for ways to engage makers and educators.

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