The Arduino Due is the newcomer microcontroller board in the Arduino boards family. It's the first board based on a 32 bit ARM core processor, the Atmel SAM3X8E ARM Cortex-M3 MCU, that improve all the standard Arduino functionalities and add more new features.
The Arduino Due has 54 digital input/output pins (of which 12 can be used as PWM outputs), 12 analog inputs, 4 UARTs (hardware serial ports), an 84 MHz clock, a USB-OTG capable connection, 2 DAC (digital to analog), 2 TWI, a power jack, an SPI header, a JTAG header, a reset button and an erase button. There are also some cool features like DACs, Audio, DMA , an experimental multi tasking library and more.
The Due has two usb connectors, the one with the micro-usb AB connector is the native one capable to act as an USB host, that means you can connect compatible external usb peripherals to the board, such as mouse, keyboards, smartphones. While the other USB port with the type B connector is intended for debugging purposes.
Note
- To compile code for the ARM processor, you'll need the latest version of the Arduino IDE: v1.5.
- Unlike other Arduino boards, the Arduino Due board runs at 3.3V. The maximum voltage that the I/O pins can tolerate is 3.3V. Providing higher voltages, like 5V to an I/O pin could damage the board.
