Planet Arduino

Hello readers

Today we are going to examine the Freetronics “2010″ (Duemiladieci in Italian). This is a 100% Arduino Duemilanove-compatible board with some very neat enhancements. It was conceived by two Arduino experts here in Australia, Jon Oxer (co-author of the fascinating book “Practical Arduino“) and Marc Alexander. These two gentleman have formed Freetronics to help people build the projects detailed in the Practical Arduino book, assist people in releasing their hardware designs and generally help accelerate the open-source hardware movement. Jon and Marc were recently interviewed about Freetronics and the 2010 by Marcus Schappi, a copy of which can be viewed here.

But for now, back to the 2010. First of all, let’s have a look:

At first glance you may think “oh, just another Arduino clone”. Not so, however it is 100% compatible with the Arduino Duemilanove, so you can use the 2010 without any modification. Nevertheless upon closer inspection there are several small and large differences. The first thing to notice is the prototyping area. By doing some clever PCB routing, the designers have made space for a small but handy area for you to add your own circuitry. Here is a close up look:

Furthermore the corners have been rounded off, a small but thoughtful modification. The designers have also made the effort to label everything clearly, including the voltage and socket polarity for DC input, very handy for the beginner. And to make life easier, those large copper pads on the rear are for the 5V power and GND, so voltage supply is taken care of for you. It is obvious that this board has been designed by people who use the Arduino system and not some knock-off manufacturer from eBay. The next visible differences are around the USB socket:

Those four holes are the X3 programming pads, much easier to use than the solder pads on the original Duemilanove. The purpose of these is to allow you to use your 2010 board as an AVR programmer, in order to program the bootloader into the microcontroller. Speaking of which, this is the ATmega328, identical to the Duemilanove’s chip. Next to the X3 pads is a mini-USB socket. In my case I love it, as when making my own shields I often need all the under-shield space I can use. For example:

And don’t worry about not having the correct USB cable, as one is supplied with the 2010. Subjectively, being one metre long, it could be longer. But you cannot please everyone!

Also note that the 2010 board has another mounting hole just behind the DC power socket, which increases stability if used in a more permanent situation. Moving around to the tail end of the 2010, the four LEDs have been placed here – allowing them to stay visible even with shields on top.

The power LED is a nice blue colour as well, TX is yellow, RX is green, and D13 is red. The circuitry for the D13 LED has been modified slightly, it will not come on when digital pin 13 is used as an input. Otherwise, everything else is in the correct, identical position to the Arduino Duemilanove. So all your shields will work, the ICSP (in circuit serial programmer) pins are in the same spot, and the pin current ratings and board input voltage range is identical. The complete specifications can be found here: 2010.pdf.

In conclusion, this is a board that is faithful to the Arduino design and improves on it. After using this board over the last ten days I can happily say it has worked flawlessly and all my sketches and shields have been compatible with the 2010. If you need another Duemilanove board, I can honestly recommend this one as a product of choice.

It is available directly from Freetronics, or other retailers including Little Bird Electronics.

High resolution photos are available on flickr.

As always, thank you for reading and I look forward to your comments and so on. Please subscribe using one of the methods at the top-right of this web page to receive updates on new posts. Or join our new Google Group.