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 setof 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.

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; these are detailed on the getting started page.

The board includes: Analog joystick with central push-button, 4 push-buttons, Linear pot, mic, light sensor, temp sensor, 3-axis accelerometer, buzzer, RGB LED, 4 TinkerKit (2 In, 2 Out), TFT display connector