Arduino Due Board

The Arduino technology

Arduino is an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple i/o board and a development environment that implements the Processing/Wiring language. Arduino is one of the most famous technology for hobbyist and education. It is immensely popular and used as the core for many educational classes. The Arduino board is a great board for prototyping and experimentation, which makes it ideal as a beginner's board.

Why Arduino ?

• Arduino is Inexpensive
• Arduino is Cross-platform
• Arduino offers a simple, clear programming environment
• Open source and extensible software
• Open source and extensible hardware

Need help choosing the right Arduino? Check out our guide!

The Arduino Due board

Arduino Due is the first Arduino board that is based on a 32 bit ARM architecture. UsuallyLa carte Arduino Due est la première carte Arduino basée sur une architecture ARM 32bit. Usually, the Arduino boards are based on an architecture ATMega 328.
The Arduino Due has an Atmel SAM3X8E ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller. The Arduino Due has 54 digital input/output pins (of which 12 can be used as PWM outputs), 12 analog inputs, 4 UARTs (hardware serial ports), a 84 MHz clock, an USB OTG capable connection, 2 DAC (digital to analog), 2 TWI, a power jack, an SPI header, a JTAG header, a reset button and an erase button.

Warning ! Unlike other Arduino boards, the Arduino Due board runs at 3.3V. The maximum voltage that the I/O pins can tolerate is 3.3V. Providing higher voltages, like 5V to an I/O pin could damage the board !

Technical specifications of the Arduino Due board

The main features of Arduino Due are the following:

• Microcontroller AT91SAM3X8E
• Operating Voltage : 3.3V
• Input Voltage (recommended) : 7-12V
• Input Voltage (limits) : 6-20V
• Digital I/O Pins : 54 (of which 12 provide PWM output)
• Analog Input Pins : 12
• Analog Outputs Pins : 2 (DAC)
• Total DC Output Current on all I/O lines : 130 mA
• DC Current for 3.3V Pin : 800 mA
• DC Current for 5V Pin : 800 mA
• Flash Memory : 512 KB all available for the user applications
• SRAM : 96 KB (two banks: 64KB and 32KB)
• Clock Speed : 84 MHz

Advantages of the ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller

The Cortex-M3 offers more performance than the usual 8bits microntrollers found on other Arduino boards. In particular, the ARM Cortex-M3 allows the Arduino Due:

• A 32-bit core, that allows operations on 4 bytes wide data within a single CPU clock. (for more information look int type page).
• CPU Clock at 84Mhz.
• 96 KBytes of SRAM.
• 512 KBytes of Flash memory for code.
• a DMA controller, that can relieve the CPU from doing memory intensive tasks.

Programming Arduino Due

The open-source IDE can be downloaded for free (currently for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux). Some tutorials are available on the official Arduino web site. These tutorials help you to write your first program with Arduino boards.

As presented in the above image, the Arduino Due features two USB connectors: the programming port and native USB port. Both can be used to inject your program on the board, however, it is recommended to use the programming port that works even if the MCU crashed before. Refer to the official documentation for more information.