I had an amazing time at this past weekend, and one of the exciting pieces of news is that the Arduino DUE will be available on October 22nd for $49 (plus taxes). Massimo made the announcement during his "The Arduino Hour" talk along with Alf-Egil of Atmel:
The DUE is powered by a 84 MHz ARM Cortex M3 from Atmel and will be compatible with all shields that were made according to the Uno r3 spec. However, since the architecture is no longer AVR, some shield libraries will need to be modified.
I caught Massimo's DUE demonstration later on where he showed how easy it is to use a USB mouse with the library they've developed. He didn't show any other code examples, so it remains to be seen if the power of this new Arduino can be easily accessed by novice users. These been many attempts to bring the Arduino beyond AVR in the past with limited success in my opinion. I'm hopeful that Arduino can now make the jump to ARM successfully as the Arduino core team is now onboard.
So I'm wondering what our Arduino group here thinks about this development. Is the price point good? Is it reasonable to expect the same ease of use that is the hallmark of AVR-based Arduino?
Cheers,
Drew

