Arduino Leonardo

[Karl W4KRL]

Tacoistos,

 

Last week after Tacos I bought an Arduino Leonardo at Microcenter for $20.
The Leonardo is an evolution of the Uno. My early experience with the
Leonardo is good. If you haven't yet tried using an Arduino the Uno may
still be a better first unit because of all the support available for it,
however, the Leonardo is turning out to be a much better choice for my SWR
touch screen display project.

 

There may be some Uno shields that will not work with the Leonardo but so
far every shield I have tried has worked including the Seeed Studio 2.6-inch
touch screen. The touch screen uses the SPI bus to greatly reduce the number
of pins needed versus the Adafruit display (7 versus 16) so it is one of the
more complicated shields. One of the really attractive things about the
Leonardo is that the SPI bus is completely independent of the data pins. On
the Uno it parallels the D10, 11, 12 and 13 pins so you lose them even if
the shield does not use them. 

 

Another thing that looks really nice about the Leonardo is that the Atmel
chip is a surface mount device rather that a socketed DIP. This means there
is a lot more headroom for parts on the underside of a proto shield. When I
laid out a proto shield to mount an AD9850 DDS board it was difficult to
find a spot where it did not interfere with parts on the Uno. No problem
with the Leonardo.

 

There are four (4!) more analog inputs for a total of 10. They are shared
with digital IO pins but it gives you a lot more flexibility for
interfacing. PWM and serial interfaces are also more flexible but I have not
used them yet. More details at
http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardLeonardo.

 

Finally, the Leonardo uses a dirt cheap ($1 at the dollar store) micro-USB
cable versus the harder to find and much more expensive type B printer cable
used on the Uno and other models.

 

If you buy one make sure the box says "+ HEADERS" or there will no
connectors for the shields and no power connector. At Microcenter ones with
and without headers were all in the same pile on the shelf so beware.

 

73 Karl W4KRL

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