New Arduino Boards announced!

The New Arduino DUE, just look at all those pinouts!

I've really enjoyed learning basic digital electronics with the Arduino UNO it's a little lacking in the number of pinouts for different sensors and such, but that's also forced me to learn how to use many basic electronic components  like transistors and shift registers to gain additional functionality.  Problem is I've been kicking around a few ideas for some larger projects that I've already started sketching out on paper and figuring out the  parts needed, but most of them were far off way down the road because I figured I'd have to purchase an AVR programmer for programming powerful microchips.  Then out of the blue I come across a few posts on different sites I get RSS feeds from and find out that the makers of the Arduino are releasing some newer boards with even more power, memory and larger number of pinouts for hooking up more sensors and such to an Arduino.  I'm really excited to see how much the new Arduino DUE will cost and to get my hands on a couple of the boards as I've already started to go back to my long list of projects and realizing there is a good chance quite a few of them can be accomplished with this new board.

From the  wired article...
"The new Arduino Due sports a considerably beefier set of stats, incorporating a 32-bit ARM-based microcontroller that can run up to 96 MHz. For comparison, standard Arduinos normally have an 8-bit, 16 MHz processor. It has 256 KB of flash memory and 50 KB of RAM (SRAM, to be precise). This more advanced processor should allow hackers and DIYers to create more advanced projects than have been possible with Arduinos in the past.


The Due will first roll out to developers, rather than immediately being released to the community at large. The company plans a final, tested release by the end of 2011."