Arduino Uno R4 Minima

Board arrived before the expected date and seems to work great. It took a few minutes to reconfigure the IDE for it, but I finally got it working. First time ever not using the standard ATMega processor. The higher speed really makes a difference and the extra memory is awesome.

I'm very disappointed, I've purchased other clones, ELEGOO Uno R3 and 6 Lafvin Nanos. They all came with cables and worked right out the box. I thought I would get a real Arduino and when the R4 Minima came out I bought one, only to find that it wouldn't work with the USB cables I had. After doing some online research I upgraded my IDE to the newest version, and it still didn't work. After more research I found that I needed a data only cable. I bought one from you and the Minima now works. I would have thought that with the cable being so special you either would have supplied one or at least informed the purchaser that one was required. Guess I'll stick with clones from now on.

This board and the R4 WiFi do not have crystal time base. At least the Minima has pads for a tiny crystal, bit it isn't populated. (Why, oh Why, not?)Other than massively imprecise millis() clock, other functions work as expected, but just about all of my projects require better precision than a couple of seconds every few minutes.I'm very disappointed, that I can't use this board for prototyping any of my current projects. I need to set time manually and let it run for a day or so and report results every few seconds with a maximum error of two seconds. That is easily possible with the Raspberry Pi Pico and various ESP8266 andESP32 boards that I have evaluated.

The VBATT option is missing on the minima version. So it is not possible to use a battery for time keeping with the RTC. Because the RTC is built-in, the libraries to use other RTCs are not supported. I am very frustrated with this. I do not need wifi or the fancy led array for my project. I thought the minima was the way to go but now it is useless for my project. Another device that will go in my disappointment bin.

Turns out I need to manually add a pullup resistor to use this with an i2c screen. This really fucking sucks, it's one of only 2 things I need to do with it and it makes the project go to shit - I either spend more money or scrap it. You don't mention this on the product page..."Brace yourself for an upgrade like no other with the Arduino UNO R4 Minima!"Ought to be "Brace yourself for some soldering!"

I really like the harware and extra memory. There are some libraries like the liquidCrystal_I2C library, TEA5767 library, and others.. that the Arduino IDE seems to show me a warning that those libraries might may not be compatible. And it reality it is true the screen shows several symbols on the screen and the TEA5767 fm radio module stops working. It's funny because the PlatformIO for VScode acepthem without any issues. Overall, the hardware looks nice.

Excellent device. I bought two WiFi models which I'm running on the Arduino IoT cloud, picking up NTP time data and then monitoring sensors and turning LEDs on and off in the Dashboard. I've got dozens of Arduinos *Uno R3, Nanos, Megas, Micros, Pro Mini and various other vendor specific boards. They're all very good. They all do what they were advertised to do. In my opinion, the R4 is the best value. It's easy to use, fast and a breeze to configure for Arduino's IoT Cloud.

Arduino UNO R4 is just what I needed, not so much because of its greater computing power than R3, but because of the greater amount of memory it has, and now I can take my projects to another level. I have been able to add a LoRa transceiver to a monitoring device (which is now integrated into home automation at home), and I still have so much memory available that I don't have to worry about it in future upgrades; moreover, the time it took to port the software from R3 only involved downloading the appropriate firmware and selecting the board! And what about the simply fantastic IDE.....: I had never worked with an ESP32 before, but I experienced no difficulties or limitations, even with the libraries!In addition, the support is excellent.

It's helpful to finally have a faster up-to-date Cortex processor in a system that can operate at 5 volts. However, I was surprised to see my delivered devices were missing the crystal to create an accurate clock rate. Instead we'll have to use the chip's inaccurate built-in RC clock mode. There's a bank spot on the PCB for a crystal, I hope future builds include this important feature.