Arduino Esplora

Arduino Esplora

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 setof onboard sensors for interaction. It is designed for people who want to get up and running with Arduino without having to learn about the electronics first. For a step-by-step introduction to the Esplora, check out the Getting Started with Esplora guide.

The Esplora has onboard sound and light outputs, and several input sensors . It also includes 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 color TFT LCD screen.

Like the Leonardo board, the Esplora uses an Atmega32U4 AVR microcontroller with 16 MHz crystal oscillator and a micro USB connection . It is capable of acting as a USB client device, like a mouse or a keyboard.

In the upper left corner of the board there is a reset pushbutton, that you can use to restart the board. There are four status LEDS :

ON [green] indicates whether the board is receiving power supply

L [yellow] connected directly to the microcontroller, accessible through pin 13

RX and TX [yellow] indicates the data being transmitted or received over the USB communication

The board contains everything needed to support the microcontroller simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable to get started.

The Esplora has built-in USB communication it can appear to a connected computer as a mouse or keyboard, in addition to a virtual (CDC) serial / COM port. This has other implications for the behavior of the board these are detailed on the getting started page.

Summary:

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 16 MHz

Schematic &amp Reference Design:

EAGLE files: arduino-esplora-reference-design.zip

Schematic: arduino-esplora-schematic.pdf