It was only a matter of time after the Arduino R4 boards were released that we would get some clone boards. In this article we will look at 2 of the Arduino R4 Wifi boards
Lets look at these boards with this image that I took of them side by side.
r4 wifi boards
In case you do not know in the image above, from the left its the 2 clone boards then the official R4 Wifi board on the right. We will refer to these as boards 1 and 2
They have the same general spec as the official board, if you are unaware of what the R4 Wifi gives you, lets recap
| Board | Name | Arduino® UNO R4 WiFi |
| SKU | ABX00087 | |
| Microcontroller | Renesas RA4M1 (Arm® Cortex®-M4) | |
| USB | USB-C® | Programming Port |
| Pins | Digital I/O Pins | 14 |
| Pins | Analog input pins | 6 |
| DAC | 1 | |
| PWM pins | 6 | |
| Communication | UART | Yes, 4x |
| I2C | Yes, 1x | |
| SPI | Yes, 1x | |
| CAN | Yes 1 CAN Bus | |
| Power | Circuit operating voltage | 5 V (ESP32-S3 is 3.3 V) |
| Input voltage (VIN) | 6-24 V | |
| DC Current per I/O Pin | 8 mA | |
| Clock speed | Main core | 48 MHz |
| ESP32-S3 | up to 240 MHz | |
| Memory | RA4M1 | 256 kB Flash, 32 kB RAM |
| ESP32-S3 | 384 kB ROM, 512 kB SRAM | |
| Dimensions | Width | 68.85 mm |
| Length | 53.34 mm | |
Now board 2 has extra headers which I do like on a board like this – very handy for connecting cables directly to the headers. There is the typical 2 pins for power and gnd and then one for I/O. All of the I/O is brought out to these headers as well as the standard Uno header setup.
Arduino IDE
I saw no issues with the IDE, both boards were recognized and assigned com ports on my Windows 10 system. I uploaded one of the LED matrix examples and compiled and programmed as expected.
Pricing
| board 1 | Price is £12.34 |
| board 2 | ABout £15 although the price varies on Aliexpress |
| official r4 Wifi board | About 25 euros from the official store |
Summary
Now some people do not want to use clone boards, that is fair enough but from a quality and pricing point they are a good option. Of course if you want to support Arduino and their great efforts with developing boards, the work with the development tools and documentation then purchase from them.
