Arduino UNO R4 is the long-awaited update of the well-known Arduino UNO board, which has been announced on Arduino Day 2023 and will be available at 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 it was beginning to be necessary.
The new Arduino UNO R4 will feature a Renesas RA4M1 Arm Cortex-M4F 32-bit processor with a clock speed of 48 MHz. Not only is it three times faster in Mhz than the current one, but we are finally moving from 8 bits to 32 bits.
In terms of 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 us that the new Arduino UNO R4 is going to be much faster than the current model, and it will be able to handle much more powerful and advanced projects. For example, it will be a great pleasure to be able to use the STD library without space problems.
Optionally, the Arduino UNO R4 will feature a WiFi 4 connectivity module and Bluetooth 5.0. For this, they have relied on an ESP32-S3 (which, curiously, has much more power than the Renesas RA4M1).
The USB port of the device has been updated to a USB Type-C. An improvement that seems small but, personally, I find very useful, because it was a pain to carry the USB Type-B cable that is currently not used for anything.
The operating voltage also increases to 24V (which does not mean that it is a good idea to power it at that voltage).
The expected specifications are as follows:
- Renesas RA4M1 Arm Cortex-M4F MCU @ 48 MHz processor
- 32KB SRAM
- 256KB flash
- 8KB dataflash
- (Optional) WiFi connectivity via ESP32-S3-MINI-1
- Expansions - Arduino UNO headers with Pins
- 14x GPIO
- 6x ADC
- 1x12-bit analog DAC
- 6x PWM
- 6x UART, I2C, SPI
- 1 x USB Type-C
- CAN Bus
- GPIO voltage at 5V (max 20mA pin)
- Power supply 7 to 24V (via connector or Vin pin)
- Dimensions 68.6 x 53.4mm
The form factor remains the same as the traditional Arduino UNO. Compatibility with existing hardware and projects has been ensured, both physically and electrically.
Work has also been done on compatibility with the most popular Arduino libraries. Thus, an “Early adopter” program has been launched to facilitate developers porting their code to the new R4 board.
The release of the Arduino UNO R4 is scheduled for the end of May. We do not 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 “fanatics” of the 8 bits.
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 06/26/2023: Arduino has released the final versions of Arduino R4. More information in this post