I must have missed something a while back, but Arduino being sold at Radio Shack is news to me! I think this is great for the maker movement and people trying to get started with Ardiuno. RS is selling a book and various shields - in store no less! I recall reading that RS was going back to its DIY roots [1] - I guess they were serious about it

1. http://blog.radioshack.com/2011/05/19/radioshack-the-diy-com...

There are lots of small version of Arduino around such as:

Pro Mini: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11113

Pro Micro: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11098?

Arduino Nano: http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardNano

Yes, but SparkFun's Pro boards lack the on-board USB hardware, and require you to have a "fancy" USB-to-TTL cable. There's also the ExtraCore (https://tindie.com/dustinandrews/extracore/) which has the same requirement.

And the Arduino Nano seems to no longer be carried by Arduino themselves, I was unable to find it in the shop.

I think this looks nice since it's based on a more recent AVR chip, that has on-board USB so that even the small form factor doesn't mean the board can't have a "native" USB connector.

There's still the Teensy 2.0/3.0 which is smaller & cheaper than this board. The Teensy 2.0 ($16) uses the same chip (32u4) as the arduino micro, and the 3.0 ($19) uses an arm-m4 chip which also provides a DSP. The best thing about the Teensy is that it's available right now.

The teensy 3.0 also comes with a 16 bit ADC (of the succeessive approximation breed, not sure of the quality).

Most of the arduino-like boards have a 10 bit resolution.

Is the teensy 3(arm) fully compatible with all the arduino libraries ?

Yes and no. Even some arduinos are incompatible with certain arduino libraries. Most of the libraries were written for the most popular 328p chip at the most popular frequency (16mhz), but if you're using a Due or Attiny or even the 328p running a different frequency, you may need to touch up the libraries to get it to work. My guess is the compatibility levels would be similar here.

Most people are probably only aware of the arduino uno which uses the 328p chip, but there are probably 20 other atmel chip models that are also "arduino compatible". I typically use the attiny85 because my one-off projects rarely need all the pins on the 328p.

Teensy 3.0 looks awesome. Do you know anything similar with a radio?

The Wixel seems to be similar, but with built in wireless.

http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/1336

Looks like a 30kbps radio on a serial interface, 256 channels in the 2.4GHz band, 50 foot indoor range typical. $20 for µcontroller with radio.

I've been using Teensy 2 for about a year and they're awesome!

The Pro Micro (http://sfe.io/11098) does have on-board USB hardware that requires no USB-TTL converters, no matter how fancy. We added it to the SparkFun site in late February.

Arduino Nano in stock: http://www.miniinthebox.com/pt/eletronica-diy-arduino-v3-0-n..., http://www.gravitech.us/arna30wiatp.html

There's also Tinyduino on the making: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kenburns/tinyduino-the-t...

I like the Pro Mini because you can have it in 3.3V version, easier to interface with low-voltage devices like sensors and GPS chips.

This reminds me of the Teensy: http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/

The Teensy has been available for a couple years in this size. Teensy 3 comes with an ARM processor in the same board.

http://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy.html

Non-blogspam link: http://arduino.cc/blog/2012/11/08/new-arduino-micro-availabl...

I love the Arduino, but the boards are expensive when compared to other platforms. I recently started using the TI MSP430 Launchpad which is $4.50 shipped! It's also very flexible and uses very little power. If you want the simplicity of the Arduino IDE, there's a port of it called Energia. The Raspberry Pi is much more powerful than the Arduino and it's around the same price. I know the RPi isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.

Not sure what this post is about. The only news is that RadioShack is going to sell a "micro" version of the "nano."

I bought my Arduino Nano earlier this year from gravitech.us and they're still shipping them as of 2012-11-09 09:32am (CST).

http://www.gravitech.us/arna30wiatp.html

I have no affiliation with gravitech. For the record, I bought the breadboard it's mounted on from RS. Plugs in tight. I use the avr-gcc tool chain -- and it works.

This looks to be even better: http://digistump.com/#digispark

Though it's not yet in production (it finished a successful kickstarter funding round in september), which should be sometime in early 2013.

I will put my own headers on for $4, thank you.

And I'll pay someone $4 to save 5 minutes of my time.