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 set of onboard sensors for interaction. It’s 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, including 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 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.

• Microcontroller: ATmega32u4
• Operating voltage: 5 V
• Flash memory: 32 KB of which 4 KB used by bootloader
• SRAM: 2.5 KB
• EEPROM: 1 KB
• Clock speed: 16 MHz
• Length: 164.04 mm
• Width: 60 mm
• Weight: 53 gr