The Arduino UNO is legendary among makers, and with the release of the UNO R4 in 2023, the family gained a powerful new member. But with two incredible options, which UNO should you pick for your project? Here’s a breakdown of what makes each board shine, depending on your needs, skills, and goals.

Why the UNO Rev3 is still a go-to classic

The UNO Rev3 has been around for over a decade, earning its reputation as a solid, reliable board perfect for beginners. Simple, robust, and versatile, it’s the “base camp” of the Arduino ecosystem. Its 8-bit architecture makes it straightforward to understand exactly what’s happening in your code. 

Applications and ideal uses 

The UNO Rev3 is fantastic for projects like controlling LEDs, motors, and simple sensors – as well as any of the 15 projects included in our best-selling Arduino Starter Kit.

Its ability to handle a higher current directly from each pin makes it ideal for connecting power-hungry sensors or motors without needing extra components. It’s also compatible with an enormous number of sketches and libraries that have been built around it over the years.

One key advantage? The microcontroller on the UNO Rev3 can be removed, allowing you to use it independently – a feature that many seasoned users love.

Over the years, users have pushed it to the limit to create some pretty impressive applications: a remarkably powerful library for audio, an interactive crypto-mining tool, and even a whole BASIC computer that you can hang around your neck like a badge!

The UNO R4 was designed for the modern maker

The UNO R4 builds on everything makers love about the Rev3, adding features that bring it up to speed with the needs of today’s tech. Its 32-bit Arm® Cortex®-M4 guarantees significantly faster processing power and can handle more advanced projects. It comes in two versions: the UNO R4 Minima for essential functionality and the UNO R4 WiFi for Internet-connected projects.

The latter is the brains of the Plug and Make Kit: the easiest way to go from zero to tech hero, with step-by-step tutorials to create a custom weather station, a video game controller, a smart timer and so much more!

Advanced features for new possibilities

The UNO R4 packs in features that are groundbreaking for the UNO family:

• 12-bit DAC: Enables analog output for audio waveforms or other analog components without external circuitry.
• CAN bus: Ideal for connecting multiple devices in robotics or automotive projects.
• Wi-Fi® and Bluetooth® on the R4 WiFi model: Easily build IoT projects and connect to the Arduino Cloud to control your devices remotely.
• Enhanced Diagnostics: The R4 WiFi includes an error-capturing mechanism that helps beginners by identifying issues in the code, a fantastic learning tool.

Applications and ideal uses 

With increased memory and processing power, the UNO R4 is perfect for projects that require complex calculations or manage multiple processes. Think IoT, data sensing, automation systems, creative installations or scientific equipment where precise measurements and real-time adjustments are key.

What’s more, the UNO R4 has the capability to leverage AI – and our community has jumped at the chance of exploring whole new realms. One user built a gesture recognition system made of cardboard, another added smart detection to a pet door to always know if their cat was home or not, and another yet came up with a great tool to always know what song is playing.
Not to mention the possibilities for advanced animations like this one – inspired by Bad Apple – developed thanks to the LED matrix right on the UNO R4.

Is a 32-bit MCU always better than an 8-bit?

The short answer is, no. We believe the best solution is always determined by the requirements of the project at hand: bigger, faster, more powerful or more expensive is not always better.

8-bit microcontrollers process data in 8-bit chunks, which limits the size of numbers they can handle directly to values between 0 and 255 (or -127 and 128). This limitation makes them best suited for applications with minimal data processing needs, such as basic tasks like toggling LEDs or controlling simple sensors. However, they also tend to be more affordable and to consume less power, making hardware design less expensive, and have a simpler architecture, which translates to easier programming. So, if you are still learning the basics and need the most straightforward tool, or you are tackling a project with minimal requirements, an 8-bit MCU is not only all you need, but probably your best option.

On the other hand, if you need to work on much larger numbers and perform data-heavy calculations, 32-bit microcontrollers can handle advanced applications like image processing and real-time analytics. The difference is not just 4-fold going from 8 to 32: it’s a huge jump from 255 to 4,294,967,295! Almost by definition, any solution that requires this kind of performance will be more complex to design and program, require more memory, and consume more power, often affecting battery life. The upside, of course, is the incredible potential of what you can achieve!

Compatibility and transitioning from UNO Rev3 to UNO R4

If you already have experience with the UNO Rev3 and are considering the R4, but have concerns about compatibility, rest assured: they have the same form factor, pinout, and 5V operating voltage. This makes it easy to transfer accessories such as shields from one to the other. 

On the software side, tutorials and projects are often compatible. We have even created a GitHub repository where you can check compatibility for libraries with the new R4 (and even help us update information or add new R4-friendly versions). This is part of the effort we share with our community to make sure that transitioning to the UNO R4 – if you choose to do so – is as seamless as possible.

Which Arduino UNO should I choose?
UNO Rev3	UNO R4
• Best for beginners or those working on foundational projects. • Great for educational settings, where understanding core programming concepts and hardware interactions are the focus. • Ideal if you need a reliable, budget-friendly, no-frills board with vast project resources available online.	• Perfect for advanced users or beginners looking to push boundaries with more complex projects. • Best for IoT, data-intensive, or networked applications that require more processing power. • A smart choice if you’re experimenting with new peripherals like CAN bus, DAC, or Wi-Fi/Bluetooth connectivity.

Choose your UNO and start creating!

Whether you choose the classic UNO Rev3 or the more recent UNO R4, you’re joining a global community of makers, educators, and inventors who love to create. Both boards offer incredible opportunities, each tailored to different stages and styles of making.
Ready to dive into a new project? Buy your next UNO and discover limitless possibilities!

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Inventor Charly Bosch and his daughter Leonie have crafted something truly remarkable: a fully electric, Arduino-powered car that’s as innovative as it is sustainable. Called the Batteryrunner, this vehicle is designed with a focus on environmental impact, simplicity, and custom craftsmanship. Get ready to be inspired by a car that embodies the spirit of creativity!

When the Arduino team saw the Batteryrunner up close at our offices in Turin, Italy, we were genuinely impressed – especially knowing that Charly and Leonie had driven over 1,000 kilometers in this unique car! Their journey began on a small island in Spain, took them across southern France, and brought them to Italy before continuing on to Austria. 

Building a car with heart – and aluminum

In 2014, Charly took over LORYC – a Mallorca carmaker that became famous in the 1920s for its winning mountain racing team. His idea was to ??build a two-seater as a tribute to the LORYC sports legacy, but with a contemporary electric drive: that’s how the first LORYC Electric Speedster was born. “We’re possibly the smallest car factory in the world, but have a huge vision: to prove electric cars can be cool… and crazy,” Charly says. 

With a passion for EVs rooted in deep environmental awareness, he decided to push the boundaries of car manufacturing with the Batteryrunner: a car where each component can be replaced and maintained, virtually forever. 

Indeed, it’s impossible not to notice that the vehicle is made entirely from aluminum: specifically, 5083 aluminum alloy. This material is extremely durable and can be easily recycled, unlike plastics or carbon fiber which end up as waste at the end of their lifecycle. 

The car’s bodywork includes thousands of laser-cut aluminum pieces. “This isn’t just a prototype: it’s a real car – one that we’ve already been able to drive across Europe,” Charly says.

The magic of learning to do-it-yourself

“People sometimes ask me why I use Arduino, as if it was only for kids. Simple: Arduino never failed me,” is Charly’s quick reply. After over a decade of experience with a variety of maker projects, it was an easy choice for the core of Batteryrunner’s system. 

In addition to reliability, Charly appreciates the built-in ease-of-use and peer support: “The Arduino community helps me with something new every week. If you are building a whole car on your own, you can’t be an expert in every single aspect of it. So, anytime I google something, I start by typing ‘Arduino’, and follow with what I need to know. That’s how I get content that I can understand.” 

This has allowed Charly and Leonie to handle every part of the car’s design, coding, and assembly, creating a fully integrated system without needing to rely on external suppliers. 

Using Arduino for unstoppable innovation

A true labor of love, after four years since its inception the Batteryrunner is a working (and talking!) car, brought to life by 10+ Arduino boards, each with specific functions. 

For instance:

• An Arduino Nano is used to manage the speedometer (a.k.a. the “SpeedCube”), in combination with a CAN bus module, stepper motor module, and stepper motor.

• Different Arduino Mega 2560, connected via CAN bus modules, control the dashboard, steering wheel, lights and blinkers, allowing users to monitor and manage various functions.

• Arduino UNO R4 boards with CAN bus transceivers are used to handle different crucial tasks – from managing the 400-V battery system and Tesla drive unit to operating the linear windshield wiper and the robotic voice system.

Charly already plans on upgrading some of the current solutions with additional UNO R4 boards, and combining the GIGA R1 WiFi and GIGA Display Shield for a faster and Wi-Fi®-connected “InfoCube” dashboard.

All in all, the Batteryrunner is more than a car: it’s a rolling platform for continuous innovation, which Charly is eager to constantly improve and refine. His next steps? Integrating smartphone control via Android, adding sensors for self-parking, and experimenting with additional features that Arduino makes easy to implement. “This is a car that evolves,” Charly explains. “I can add or change features as I go, and Arduino makes it possible.”

Driving environmental awareness

Finally, we see Batteryrunner as more than a fun, showstopping car. Given Charly’s commitment to low-impact choices, it’s a way to shift people’s mindset about sustainable mobility. The environmental challenges we face today require manufacturers to go well beyond simply replacing traditional engines with electric ones: vehicles need to be completely redesigned, according to sustainability and simplicity principles. To achieve this, we need people who are passionate about the environment, technology, and creativity. That’s why we fully agree with Charly, when he says, “I love makers! We need them to change the world.”

Follow LORYC on Facebook or Instagram to see Charly and Leonie’s progress, upgrades, and experiments, and stay inspired by this incredible, Arduino-powered journey.

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At Cornell University, Dr. Anand Kumar Mishra and his team have been conducting groundbreaking research that brings together the fields of robotics, biology, and engineering. Their recent experiments, published in Science, explore how fungal mycelia can be used to control robots. The team has successfully created biohybrid robots that move based on electrical signals generated by fungi – a fascinating development in the world of robotics and biology.

A surprising solution for robotics: fungi

Biohybrid robots have traditionally relied on animal or plant cells to control movements. However, Dr. Mishra’s team is introducing an exciting new component into this field: fungi – which are resilient, easy to culture, and can thrive in a wide range of environmental conditions. This makes them ideal candidates for long-term applications in biohybrid robotics.

Dr. Mishra and his colleagues designed two robots: a soft, starfish-inspired walking one, and a wheeled one. Both can be controlled using the natural electrophysiological signals produced by fungal mycelia. These signals are harnessed using a specially designed electrical interface that allows the fungi to control the robot’s movement.

The implications of this research extend far beyond robotics. The integration of living systems with artificial actuators presents an exciting new frontier in technology, and the potential applications are vast – from environmental sensing to pollution monitoring.

How it works with Arduino

At the heart of this innovative project is the Arduino platform, which served as the main interface to control the robots. As Dr. Mishra explains, he has been using Arduino for over 10 years and naturally turned to it for this experiment: “My first thought was to control the robot using Arduino.” The choice was ideal in terms of accessibility, reliability, and ease of use – and allowed for seamless transition from prototyping with UNO R4 WiFi to final solution with Arduino Mega.

To capture and process the tiny electrical signals from the fungi, the team used a high-resolution 32-bit ADC (analog-to-digital converter) to achieve the necessary precision. “We processed each spike from the fungi and used the delay between spikes to control the robot’s movement. For example, the width of the spike determined the delay in the robot’s action, while the height was used to adjust the motor speed,” Dr. Mishra shares.

The team also experimented with pulse width modulation (PWM) to control the motor speed more precisely, and managed to create a system where the fungi’s spikes could increase or decrease the robot’s speed in real-time. “This wasn’t easy, but it was incredibly rewarding,” says Dr. Mishra. 

And it’s only the beginning. Now the researchers are exploring ways to refine the signal processing and enhance accuracy – again relying on Arduino’s expanding ecosystem, making the system even more accessible for future scientific experiments.

All in all, this project is an exciting example of how easy-to-use, open-source, accessible technologies can enable cutting-edge research and experimentation to push the boundaries of what’s possible in the most unexpected fields – even complex biohybrid experiments! As Dr. Mishra says, “I’ve been a huge fan of Arduino for years, and it’s amazing to see how it can be used to drive advancements in scientific research.”

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Raising chickens can be a very rewarding endeavor, as they can provide fresh daily eggs and help get rid of pests in the yard. But, like all animals, they require care. Most importantly, you’ll need to ensure that they have regular food and water, and you’ll need to protect them from predators like coyotes, foxes, and cats. To ease the workload, you may want to consider building Coders Cafe’s DIY smart chicken coop that features AI-based predator detection.

The purpose of a coop, aside from being a comfy place for chickens to roost, is to provide protection from weather and predators. This design is pretty small and is probably only suitable for one or two chickens, but the concepts can be applied to larger coops. It provides a few very useful features: remote or automated feeding, remote or automated door operation, and predator detection with remote notifications. You’ll never have to worry that you forgot to feed the chickens or that you left the door open, and you can respond immediately if you get a notification about a predator.

An Arduino UNO R4 WiFi board oversees those features, operating the door and dispensing food using simple motor-driven mechanisms. A companion app lets the user set an automated door and food schedule, or perform those actions with the tap of the button. A Twilio app integration enables SMS alerts.

The predator-detecting magic works thanks to DFRobot’s HuskyLens AI camera sensor. Users can train that to recognize specific predators and then it will tell the Arduino if it sees one. That communication occurs over I2C and is easy to setup, removing all of the difficulty of implementing AI. 

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Art and engineering are not separate concepts. There is a great deal of overlap between the two and many modern disciplines increasingly blur those lines. Mónica Rikic is an “electronic artist and creative coder” who embodies that idea: you might remember her and her incredible Arduino UNO R4-powered installations from our blog post last year. In addition to her artistic practice, her technology-forward approach inspires her work as an educator, as she helps her master’s students develop hybrid concepts that use microcontrollers, sensors, lights and a variety of different technologies to create interactive art pieces. The level of creativity that technology is able to unleash is readily apparent in two of her students’ projects: Flora and Simbioceno.

Flora, created by College of Arts & Design of Barcelona students Judit Castells, Paula Jaime, Daniela Guevara, and Mariana Pachón, is a board game in the form of an interactive art installation. It was inspired by nature, with gameplay occurring throughout a simulated ecosystem. An Arduino UNO R4 WiFi board handles the interactive elements, with additional hardware including NFC readers, motors and accompanying drivers, sensors, pumps, LEDs, and more. 

Simbioceno, by Ander Vallejo Larre, Andrea Galano Toro, Pierantonio Mangia, and Rocío Gomez, also uses an UNO R4 WiFi. It consists of two ecosystems: one aquatic and one aerial-terrestrial. They exist in symbiosis, communicating and sharing resources as necessary. Hardware includes LEDs, pumps, and biofeedback sensors. The students put particular thought into the construction materials, many of which are recycled or biomaterials. 

Both projects are interactive art and expressions of creativity. While they do integrate technology, that technology isn’t the focal point. Instead, the technology helps to bring the two experiences to life.Feeling inspired by this creative use of the Arduino platform? We hope you’ll develop your own projects and share them with us and the entire community: contact creators@arduino.cc or upload directly to Project Hub! You could be our next Arduino Star.

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Every decade or two, humanity seems to develop a renewed interest in humanoid robots and their potential within our world. Because the practical applications are actually pretty limited (given the high cost), we inevitably begin to consider how those robots might function as entertainment. But Jon Hamilton did more than just wonder, he actually built a robotic performer called Syntaxx and it will definitely make you feel things.

It is hard to describe this robot without sounding like a Mad Libs game filled out by a cyberpunk-obsessed DJ. Hamilton designed it to give performances, primarily in the form of synthetic singing accompanied by electronic music. It looks like a crude Halloween mask given life by a misguided wizard sometime in the 1980s. It is pretty bonkers and you should probably watch the video of it in action to wrap your head around the concept.

Hamilton needed three different Arduino development boards to bring this robot to life. The first, an Arduino Giga R1 WiFi, oversees the robot’s operation and handles voice interaction, as well as audio playback. The second, an Arduino Mega 2560, moves the robot’s neck according to input from two microphones (one on the left, the other on the right). The third, an Arduino Uno R4 WiFi, controls the rest of the servo movement. 

The result is a robot that is both impressive and also pretty disconcerting. 

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