Arduino UNO R4 is the long-awaited update of the well-known Arduino UNO board, which was announced on Arduino Day 2023 and will be available by the end of May.
Undoubtedly, the UNO R3 is the most popular model of our beloved Arduino. After 10 years with us, the update of this model is not only welcome but was starting to become necessary.
The new Arduino UNO R4 will feature a Renesas RA4M1 Arm Cortex-M4F 32-bit processor with a clock speed of 48 MHz. It’s not only three times faster in MHz than the current one, but we are (finally) leaving 8-bit behind to move to 32-bit.
Regarding memory, the R4 has 32KB of RAM compared to the 2KB of the R3. The flash memory is also expanded to 256KB, which is 8 times the amount available in the previous model.
This guarantees that the new Arduino UNO R4 will be much faster than the current model and will be able to handle much more powerful and advanced projects. For example, it will be a small pleasure to be able to use the STD library without running into space issues.
Optionally, the Arduino UNO R4 will include a WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity module. For this, they have relied on an ESP32-S3 (which, interestingly, has much more power than the Renesas RA4M1).
The device’s USB port has been updated to USB Type-C. An improvement that seems small but, personally, I find very useful because it was a hassle to carry the USB Type-B cable that is no longer used for anything these days.
The power supply voltage also increases up to 24V (which doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to power it at that voltage).
{ “CPU and Memory”: [ { “label”: “Processor”, “value”: “Renesas RA4M1 Arm Cortex-M4F MCU @ 48 MHz” }, { “label”: “Memory”, “value”: [“32KB SRAM”, “256KB flash”, “8KB dataflash”] } ], “Connectivity”: [ { “label”: “WiFi”, “value”: “Optional via ESP32-S3-MINI-1” }, { “label”: “USB”, “value”: “1 x Type-C” }, { “label”: “CAN Bus”, “value”: “Yes” } ], “Devices”: [ { “label”: “GPIO”, “value”: “14x” }, { “label”: “ADC”, “value”: “6x” }, { “label”: “DAC”, “value”: “1x 12-bit” }, { “label”: “PWM”, “value”: “6x” }, { “label”: “Interfaces”, “value”: [“6x UART”, “I2C”, “SPI”] }, { “label”: “Expansions”, “value”: “Arduino UNO headers with Pins” } ], “Power and Dimensions”: [ { “label”: “Power Supply”, “value”: “7 to 24V (connector or Vin pin)” }, { “label”: “GPIO Voltage”, “value”: “5V (max 20mA pin)” }, { “label”: “Dimensions”, “value”: “68.6 x 53.4 mm” } ] }
The form factor is maintained compared to the traditional Arduino UNO. Efforts have been made to guarantee physical and electrical compatibility with existing hardware and projects.
Work has also been done on compatibility with the most popular Arduino libraries. Thus, an “Early adopter” program has been launched to help developers port their code to the new R4 board.
The launch of the Arduino UNO R4 is scheduled for the end of May. We don’t know its price yet, but I hope it remains affordable, just like the previous model.
On the other hand, the current Arduino UNO R3 is not going to disappear, and Arduino has guaranteed that it will remain available for the “fans” of 8-bit.
When we have more information, I will update the post. For now, I leave you the link to the official page UNO R4 — Arduino Official Store
Update 26/06/2023: Arduino has released the definitive versions of Arduino R4. More information in this post
