Arduino boards, and specifically the Arduino Uno, have helped engineers and hackers get started with electronic DIY projects for many years and remain extremely popular. This popularity is due in some part to people’s familiarity with the board, and the ecosystem of shields and programming resources that surround it.
If you search around you’ll find a large number of clones that use the same design and function in largely the same manner. The Maker UNO, however, provides a different take on this, as a board that’s not so much a clone, but an enhanced sibling.
The device looks roughly—but not quite—like a standard Uno, and importantly maintains the same footprint for shields, along with the ATmega328P microcontroller. To cut down on price, they stripped off the voltage regulator and DC power input jack, as most beginner projects use USB power. They replaced it instead with a piezo buzzer, allowing it to play sounds with no extra hardware. Additionally, each digital I/O pin, along with 5V, 3.3V, Tx, and Rx have their own LED indicator, allowing you to see what output is functioning at a glance.
Finally, the device forgoes a standard USB-B connector in favor of the common USB micro-B connector. Be sure to check out the demonstration of this excellent board in the video below:
