Arduino UNO coming to Seeed depot

Saturday 25 September represents the beginning of a new era for Arduino.

During Maker Faire NYC we’re going to unveil to the world a lot of changes happening to the Arduino Project.

Branding and Communication
Arduino is getting a Logo!! We partnered with the amazing studio ToDo based in Turin, Italy to design a new image for the project. This includes new packaging, new graphic design of the boards themselves, stickers, new template for the website (this is just phase one that will be followed by a more radical redesign later).

ToDo is run by Giorgio Olivero who graduated from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and was part of the small group of students that followed our experimentations with microcontrollers way before we started working on Arduino. He’s a special kind of designer that understands Arduino very well.

We’ve revamped the blog turning it into a repository of cool projects that people are doing with Arduino. The blog now becomes the answer to the classic question “what are people doing with Arduino?”.

Arduino has completed the registration of its trademark in the USA and the rest of the world. This will allow us to better protect us from the people who are misleading the community by pretending to be selling original Arduino products or even representing us in a certain country.

Finally Arduino has acquired its own USB Vendor ID so that our new boards will be clearly identify themselves as Arduino.

Arduino Store
We have received quite a a lot of feedback from people who would like us to have our own Arduino branded webstore.
People have provided a number reasons for this request but one that was quite compelling for us was being a place where one can find products made by all the different members of the Arduino ecosystem, a curated selection of what the Arduino world is making.

We have resisted doing this in the past because we didn’t want to interfere with the sales made by distributors but we feel that now their business is strong on its feet and your added value is quite clear.

It will be open to the public on the 18 of October.

Hardware
We are launching two new board and announcing some upcoming products.

Arduino Uno

This board will replace the Duemilanove. We decided to be nice to the non-italians and use a name that was simpler to pronounce and write. Uno means one in italian and this board for us is the basic building block of the Arduino product line. We replaced the aging FTDI chipset with a custom made usb-serial converter built with an Atmel ATmega8U2 this provides lower latency and doesn’t require to install any drivers on mac and linux (on windows all you need is a simple .inf file) more advanced users will be able to reprogram the USB chip to make the board show up as a variety of USB devices (Keyboards, Mice, Joysticks, MIDI etc)

ToDo worked their magic also on the board redesigning its graphic language keeping the form factor that has become an industry standard.
We believe this strong branding will better differentiate us from the cloners and let customers identify much better the original product.
Finally these boards are fully CE certified with pending FCC certification.

Arduino Mega 2560

An upgrade for the Arduino Mega which will sport the new Atmel USB chip plus an ATMega2560 processor with twice as much flash memory. We’ve been able to obtain some significant savings due improvements in the production process and better pricing from suppliers that we are happy to pass on to customers. This board will have the same graphic design as the UNO.
At the moment, due to limitations in the GCC compiler only 128k of flash are immediately useable but we’re very close to unlocking the whole memory space.

VIA Arduino.cc

You will be able to purchase the new ARDUINO in near 2 days, check it out here:

http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/arduino-controller-official-arduino-boards-c-79_81.html

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