Arduino Uno was one of the most popular microcontroller development boards, thanks to the easy to use Arduino programming environment and the community support. Even though Arduino has released numerous advanced development boards over the years, the Arduino Uno still kept the thrown to itself, thanks to the user friendly form factor and availability of the vast number of supported shields. Not only that the availability of cheap and pocket friendly clones also played a big part in it. Last year, after 13 years of Arduino Uno’s release, they released the all new Arduino Uno R4 with more powerful hardware. Even though the Uno R4 is hardware compatible with the original Uno, people were still hesitant to transition from the Uno despite the compatibility and advanced hardware. One of the major reasons for that is the price. The Arduino Uno R4 minima costs around ₹1400 while the Uno R4 WiFi costs around ₹2300.
Now, the Chinese maker electronics manufacturer Maker Go comes with a solution for that, an Arduino Uno clone for less than half the price of the original board. Maker Go has launched its own take on the Arduino UNO R4 Minima called the RA4M1 Core board. As the name suggests the RA4M1 Core board uses the same SoC as the Uno R4 and comes in the same form factor and pinouts. The board is fully compatible with the original Uno R4 and even boasts some additional features such as the option to populate male and female header pins at the same time as the GPIOs and even a physical switch for selecting the GPIO logic level to either 3.3V or 5V. It also features an additional boot button for entering the bootloader mode which is missing in the original Uno R4. One another major advantage of this board is that it supports up to 50V on its DC input jack and Vin pin thanks to the onboard DC-DC converter. During the launch, it was available for about ₹80(1$) as a welcome offer, but now it is back to its original price of around ₹600(7$) and can be purchased from Aliexpress.
