Esplora Development Board for Arduino Projects

Perfect for Game Programming projects

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 on-board 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. The Esplora has on-board 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 input and output connectors, and a socket for a colour TFT LCD screen.

Specifications:

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

Memory:
The ATmega32u4 has 32 KB (with 4 KB used for the bootloader). It also has 2.5 KB of SRAM and 1 KB of EEPROM (which can be read and written with the EEPROM library).

Input and Output:
The design of the Esplora board recalls traditional gamepad design with an analogue joystick on the left and four push buttons on the right.

Esplora inputs and outputs :

- Analogue joystick with central push-button two axis (X and Y) and a centre pushbutton.
- 4 diamond pattern push-buttons 
- Linear slider potentiometer 
- Microphone
- Light sensor 
- Temperature sensor input
- Three-axis accelerometer measures the board's relation to gravity on three axes (X, Y, and Z)
- Buzzer can produce square-waves.
- RGB led bright LED with Red Green and Blue elements for colour mixing.
- 2 Inputs to connect sensor modules with the 3-pin connectors.
- 2 Outputs to connect actuator modules with the 3-pin connectors.
- TFT display connector connector for an optional color LCD screen, SD card, or other devices that use the SPI protocol.

In order to utilise the total number of available sensors, the board uses an analogue multiplexer. This means a single analog input of the microcontroller is shared among all the input channels (except the 3-axis accelerometer). Four additional microcontroller pins choose which channel to read.