For the longest time, the creators of the Arduino have been looking at how to bring the Arduino platform into the cloud. Ethernet and WiFi shields technically work, but if you’re processing data scraped from a web page, a lowly microcontroller really isn’t the best option. Enter the Arduino YUN. At its core, it’s a regular old Arduino Leonardo. Underneath that metal plate on the board? That’s an SoC running Linux.
Basically, the Linux side of the Yun is pretty similar to a WiFi router running OpenWRT. There’s a USB port for plugging in peripherals, native WiFi support (802.11n, even!), an Ethernet connector, and enough RAM to do all the interesting stuff a small computer connected to the Internet can do.
To make all this web programming easier for Arduino neophytes, the YUN also includes a ‘bridge’ library that automates HTTP transactions between the Linux and microcontroller sides of the YUN. There’s also support for Temboo, an SDK for dozens of APIs that interact with Facebook, Dropbox, FedEx, and hundreds of other web services.
Below you can check out [Massimo] and [David] showing off their wares and going over how the YUN connects to the Internet and interacts with the microcontroller over the ‘bridge’. It’s an interesting device, and something we’ll surely check out at the World Maker Faire.
