Adafruit’s Got A New Board, An Official Arduino

There’s a new Arduino in town, this time designed in conjunction with Adafruit. It’s the Arduino Micro, a very neat little board designed for breadboard use.

Ostensibly an upgrade of the long in the tooth Arduino Nano, the new Micro takes all the best features of the new Arduino Leonardo and shrinks them down to a convenient stick of gum-sized package. It’s powered by the ATmega32u4 microcontroller, and with a MicroUSB port is able to emulate keyboards, mice and other USB input devices.

Of course with any microcontroller dev board, comparisons must be drawn between the Arduino Micro and the very popular Teensy USB dev board. Like the Teensy boards (and the new Arduino Leonardo), the Micro is able to function as a USB keyboard or mouse. The Teensys, though, is loaded with LUFA making it able to emulate just about anything from mice, USB audio devices, and MIDI synths.

21 thoughts on “Adafruit’s Got A New Board, An Official Arduino

  1. This board looks really nice especially for breadboarding. As a side note it is very easy to support LUFA on the Leonardo – In fact the github dev release of LUFA already has native support for the board built in (so the LUFA demo projects work straight-off) and you can program LUFA on it using avrdude via the Leonardo’s bootloader (avr109 over USB serial emulation) – no programmer required.

      1. You’re correct. However, if you want to do full-on ATmega32u4 development the leonardo makes a great low-cost development board and LUFA allows you to really take advantage of a wide-range of USB protocols and applications.

  2. Having made Teensy for nearly 4 years, the thing that really amazes me about these new Teensy-like boards from Arduino, Adafruit, Sparkfun is the pricing.

    For what it’s worth… apparently $8.95 more, or 56% more than Teensy 2.0… this hardware is functionally about the same and equally capable of running LUFA.

    Of course, when used from the Arduino IDE with Teensyduino extension (which is *not* LUFA-based), more USB types like MIDI are supported. I’m sure everything I’ve done on Teensy 2.0 will eventually be recreated or ported to the Arduino boards. At these prices, you’d think they could do that pretty easily….

    1. Then, of course, there’s your Teensy 3.0, which is, processor-wise, closer to the Due. Arduino worked for years to bring that sucker out, and you Kickstarted yours and got me mine before I even had time to fully imagine the possibilities. Once we get the full gamut of HUD emulation on it, it will be a beast; all at the same price (a bit less, actually) as this Adafruino. Adafruit has done some amazing, wonderful things, but this is hardly the frontier of microcontroller innovation.

    2. I was thinking the same thing Paul. First thing I did was compare it to the 2.0

      Granted the difference is only 5.95 if the teensy needs pins. Looks like that $6 is just to have the ‘arduino’ brand name on the stick.

      I’ll stick to my 2.0++ and 3.0 teensys
      :)

    3. The Arduino bootloader is completely open source. Teensy is not, correct? If it is, where can I download the source code? Can I burn it into any chip and use it in any project with that processor?

    4. I have a few leonardos and a couple of teensy 2.0 boards and would say that although the teensy is cheaper and smaller you cannot compare them like for like. The leonardo circuit has more features than the teensy like USB fuse protection, 3.3 and 5V regulation, more leds, shield headers, etc.

      Personally I think it justifies the (small) extra cost but, if you don’t need it, then teensy is a better choice.

      Having many boards to choose from is great, but price to price comparison between the leonardo (mini or maxi) and the teensy isn’t really a fair comparison IMHO

      1. I guess I am not sure what the problem with the bootloader not being open source is exactly… Doesn’t seem significant enough to warrant avoiding the Teensy altogether. Especially since the LUFA project contains the TeensyHID bootloader which can replace HalfKay if need be. Honest question; I’m barely a hobbiest. I’m just not sure what the concern is.

  3. The Arduino Micro is a not very good at anything. It locks up the IDE on both Atmel 6 and Arduino 1.0.6 and I have decided to throw mine away. Too bad it wasn’t designed correctly.

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