Description:
The Arduino Esplora is a microcontroller board derived from the Arduino Leonardo. The Esplora differs from all preceding Arduino boards in that it provides a number of built-in, ready-to-use set of on-board sensors for interaction. It's designed for people who want to get up and running with Arduino without having to learn about the electronics first. The Esplora has on-board sound and light outputs, and several input sensors, including a joystick, a slider, a temperature sensor, an accelerometer, a microphone, and a light sensor. It also has the potential to expand its capabilities with two Tinkerkit input and output connectors, and a socket for a colour TFT LCD screen (See item HCMODU0043 on our website)
Please note that the board we sell is a compatible version built to the Arduino Esplora reference design. It is completely compatible with the Arduino IDE and Esplora libraries and therefore you should expect to see no difference to an Arduino branded version.
Microcontroller: ATmega32u4
Operating Voltage: 5V
Flash Memory: 32 KB of which 4 KB used by bootloader
SRAM 2.5 KB
EEPROM: 1 KB
Clock Speed: 16Â MHz
Memory:
The ATmega32u4 has 32 KB (with 4 KB used for the bootloader). It also has 2.5 KB of SRAM and 1 KB of EEPROM (which can be read and written with the EEPROM library).
Input and Output:
The design of the Esplora board recalls traditional gamepad design with an analogue joystick on the left and four push buttons on the right.
The Esplora has the following on-board inputs and outputs :
- Analogue joystick with central push-button two axis (X and Y) and a centre pushbutton.
4 push-buttons laid out in a diamond pattern.
Linear potentiometer slider near the bottom of the board.
Microphone for getting the loudness (amplitude) of the surrounding environment.
Light sensor for getting the ambient brightness.
Temperature sensor reads the ambient temperature
Three-axis accelerometer measures the board's relation to gravity on three axes (X, Y, and Z)
Buzzer can produce square-waves.
RGB led bright LED with Red Green and Blue elements for colour mixing.
2 TinkerKit Inputs to connect the TinkerKit sensor modules with the 3-pin connectors.
2 TinkerKit Outputs to connect the TinkerKit actuator modules with the 3-pin connectors.
TFT display connector connector for an optional color LCD screen, SD card, or other devices that use the SPI protocol.
In order to utilise the total number of available sensors, the board uses an analogue multiplexer. This means a single analog input of the microcontroller is shared among all the input channels (except the 3-axis accelerometer). Four additional microcontroller pins choose which channel to read.
Downloads: Libraries are now built into the Arduino IDE from version 1.05 onwards. At the time of posting we do not recommend using the current beta version 1.5 as this seems to generate compile errors when compiling code that contains Esplora library references.
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