Arduino Primo gets support for bluetooth, nfc, wifi and ir

Arduino.org is announcing a new baseboard, the Arduino Primo, with Nordic at the Maker Faire Bay Area show. The Arduino board contains standard support for bluetooth low energy, nfc, wifi and infrared. Previously, ‘shields’ were needed to add these functions.

For the Primo board, Arduino has chosen an nRF52832 soc from Nordic Semiconductor. The soc is built around a 32bit ARM Cortex-M4F CPU with 512kB flash memory and 64kB ram. The modem supports Bluetooth low energy, ANT+ and WiFi at 2.4GHz. In addition, there is nfc-a-tag support built into the chip. The required power supply voltage of the soc is low; it needs between 1.7 and 3.6V to function.

To program the Primo, Arduino.org’s IDE software is used, but it is also possible to use the nRF5-sdk to develop ipv6 over bluetooth-le- applications, which prevents communication with, for example, other sensors that support it. via WiFi or smartphone.

For other expansions of the board, the ‘shields’ remain necessary, such as for motors, GPS, and so on. It is not yet known when the sign will be available and what it will cost. The Maker Faire Bay Area takes place May 20-22 in San Mateo, California.

Update: as also indicated in the comments, this is not about Arduino.cc, but Arduino.org, led by one of the founders of Arduino.cc. Gianluca Martino is one of the founders of Smart Projects Srl and made the signs in Italy. Martino decided in November 2014, together with the new director of Smart Projects, to rename the company Arduino Srl. Arduino.cc, owned by Arduino LLC, and Arduino Srl are thus two different companies. Arduino LLC boards are called Genuino outside the United States.