Today we release the latest addition to the Arduino family: the Arduino Due

This board is based on a powerful 32bit CortexM3 ARM microcontroller made programmable through the familiar Arduino API and its development environment. It’s an important step forward for Arduino as it increases the computing power available to Arduino users keeping the language as compatible as possible so that many programs will be migrated in a matter of minutes.

You can read all about the geeky details on the Arduino Due product page.

There are some things to be considered while approaching this new platform:

• It’s quite new so expect bugs and issues, but the code is in our github repository and we welcome any suggestion or patch.
• The AVR and ARM processors are quite different and a lot of the code that made low level access to the AVR registers won’t run on the new code without some adaptations.
• The processor, like all other in this class, runs at 3.3v therefore all the shields that fully implement the Arduino R3 layout are compatible straight away (like our wifi shield and our eth shield) but other 3rd party shield might not be compatible. if you have doubts ask your supplier and they will be able to tell you.
• It has a new IDE v1.5 that can compile both for AVR and ARM. After a period of testing and debuggin this will replace the 1.0.1 we supply at the moment. On this blog there is a post describing in more detail what’s new.
• It has some cool features like DACs, Audio, DMA , an experimental multi tasking library and more. check it out and let us know what you think.

I hope you’re all excited about this new product like we are and will join us in learning how to make the best of this new powerful product we have made available.