Arduino Clones and Variants

Unofficial boards fall into two categories. Some just take the standard open source
hardware designs of Arduino and build a cheaper one. Some names you can search for
boards of this nature include the following:
♦ The Sparkfun RedBoard
♦ The Adafruit Metro
♦ The Olimexino
More interestingly, some Arduino-compatible designs are intended to extend or
improve the Arduino in some way. New variants are appearing all the time, and far too
many exist to mention them all. However, the following are some of the more interesting
and popular variants:
♦ The Node MCU board, which is based around the ESP8266 WiFi System on a chip.
This provides a very low-cost solution for projects where you need a WiFi
connection for your Arduino. See Ch. 10 for more information.
♦ Adafruit Trinket, a very small Arduino.
♦ Freetronics EtherTen, an Arduino with built-in Ethernet.
♦ Particle Photon, a low-cost board with WiFi. It is programmed over the Internet
using Arduino C but with a Web-based IDE rather than the Arduino IDE.

Conclusion
Now that you have explored the Arduino hardware a little, it’s time to set up your Arduino
software.