STEMpedia and Arduino bring block-based coding to the Arduino® UNO R4 WiFi and UNO R4 Minima boards as well as the Arduino® Alvik robot.

Every maker remembers the moment something they built first came to life: an LED blinking, a servo sweeping, a sensor reacting to a hand wave. Today, that moment gets a lot easier to reach thanks to a new collaboration between STEMpedia and Arduino!

We’re excited to reveal that PictoBlox 10.0, STEMpedia’s coding and technology creation platform, has expanded its Arduino compatibility to include the UNO R4 WiFi, UNO R4 Minima, and Alvik robot. 

And what better place to celebrate this news than at Maker Faire Rome 2026? Join us from October 23rd–25th to explore the new integration and try PictoBlox for yourself! 

From first-time coder to confident creator

Arduino has long been a starting point in electronics for makers, students and educators.PictoBlox brings a visual, drag-and-drop programming experience that helps users to focus on programming concepts without having to start with coding syntax. Together, they can help beginners go from “I’ve never coded” to “I built a working project” in a single session.

But PictoBlox isn’t just for beginners – or just for programming. Beyond block-based coding and Python, the platform is designed to let users explore AI and machine learning, experiment with tinyML and intelligent systems, program compatible robotics and electronic hardware, and develop IoT projects. It also supports game and animation development, opening up even more opportunities for hands-on creativity and experimentation.

Announcing the collaboration, Dhrupal Shah, CEO and Co-Founder of STEMpedia, said: “Great innovations begin with the freedom to experiment. By expanding Arduino board support in PictoBlox, we are making it easier for learners and makers around the world to turn their ideas into working projects. 

“Students can create AI-powered projects and train their own Machine Learning models, making complex technologies more accessible. We’re excited to see how this collaboration inspires the global maker community to explore, build, and innovate.”

What you can do with PictoBlox and Arduino

Combining visual programming with Arduino hardware opens up all sorts of creative possibilities:

• Program with blocks: snap together scripts instead of typing code, and see how your Arduino responds right away.
• Work with sensors: read inputs such as an IR sensor and use them to trigger actions.
• Control actuators: drive LEDs and servo motors from your scripts.
• Go wireless: control your projects from a smartphone using Dabble, a project interaction and Bluetooth controller app.

By bringing together Arduino’s hardware ecosystem and PictoBlox’s versatile coding environment, the collaboration aims to make technology creation more approachable and open up new possibilities for the global maker community to learn, build, share, and innovate. 

Built for classrooms, clubs and makerspaces

Whether you’re teaching in a classroom, running a coding club or experimenting in a makerspace, this expanded integration is all about trying to lower the learning barrier and open up new possibilities for creative exploration.

By helping reduce the need to manage syntax, block-based coding means learners can focus on developing essential skills like logical thinking, problem-solving and understanding how code works. And as their confidence grows, they can build on these foundations, explore text-based programming and take on increasingly ambitious projects within the Arduino ecosystem.

For educators, it’s a compelling combination: an approachable software environment and a familiar, well-supported hardware platform, with plenty of room for students to learn, experiment and grow – all in one workflow! 

Get hands-on at Maker Faire Rome! 

Heading to Maker Faire Rome this year? Be sure to stop by booth N.02, where you can see PictoBlox and Arduino in action, try out the new integration for yourself and chat with the team. We’d love to see you there!

Download PictoBlox at: https://thestempedia.com/product/pictoblox/download-pictoblox/

Arduino, UNO, Alvik and the Arduino logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arduino S.r.l.

The post More ways to code, more ways to create: PictoBlox expands Arduino support appeared first on Arduino Blog.

GIGA R1 WiFi is built as a powerful development board, thanks to its dual-core, 32-bit STM32H747XI microcontroller, designed to operate at clock speeds of up to 480 MHz and equipped with 1 MB of RAM. Arduino Forum users KurtE and Merlin513 developed a ZephyrOS-based weather station app for it, showcasing its capabilities. What’s more, they recently published a demonstration that it also works on the less powerful UNO R4 WiFi.

The original project with GIGA

ZephyrOS is an RTOS (Real-Time Operating System), which we chose as a replacement following the end of active Mbed development in 2024. With the Arduino Core on Zephyr 0.90.0 now officially stable, it provides a foundation for applications designed to support process management, task scheduling, and real-time operation.

KurtE and Merlin513 built their weather app for ZephyrOS on the GIGA R1 WiFi with a paired touchscreen (like the GIGA Display Shield). That app is engineered to show the local weather through a nice GUI, with touch-selectable detailed information on specific days.

The result was relatively resource-intensive for a microcontroller, but the GIGA R1 WiFi’s processing and memory resources were designed to support the application.

The new, limit-stretching version

The UNO R4 WiFi is a more resource-constrained board, featuring a single-core Renesas RA4M1 microcontroller operating at 48 MHz and 32 kB of RAM. It also includes 256 kB of flash storage, compared with the GIGA R1 WiFi’s 2 MB.

This translates into two challenges: shaving the package size down to fit in the available flash storage and reducing resource usage for the available RAM. Fortunately, solving the first challenge also eliminated the second. KurtE did that by switch display libraries and simplifying the GUI elements. Most of that came down to reducing the color palette and minimizing image sizes where possible.

With these optimizations in place, KurtE demonstrated that the weather application could run on the UNO R4 WiFi and described the result as operating “reasonably well.”

The great challenge of smaller platforms

Optimizing software for constrained hardware isn’t just an exercise in trimming code – it’s a mindset that encourages thoughtful engineering. While high-spec boards give you room to dream big, figuring out how to squeeze a full RTOS, graphical interface, and real-time data onto a board with 32 kB of RAM demonstrates how practical constraints can inspire creative solutions.

Porting projects like this weather station down to smaller platforms helps make complex applications more accessible, showing that with the right optimizations, you don’t always need massive compute power to build impressive, responsive systems.

Have a similar project to share? Add it to your next post on the Arduino Forum, or document it on Arduino Project Hub so the entire community can benefit from your experience and build on it!

Arduino, GIGA, and UNO are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arduino S.r.l.

The post Porting a weather station app from the Arduino® GIGA™ R1 to the Arduino® UNO™ R4 boards appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Contributor Pasquale Barrega, author of the YouTube channel Pasquale’s LAB, has published a series of four videos dedicated to the analog-to-digital (A/D) and digital-to-analog (D/A) converters built into the Arduino UNO R4 board. The journey starts from the basic concepts and arrives at the practical construction of an electronic voice changer, using just a few external passive components and a dynamic microphone.

The first experiment: digitizing the voice

In the introductory video “Audio applications with AD and DA converters”, Pasquale explains how to take the first steps in digitizing an analog signal, in particular the one coming from a microphone. The video illustrates the schematic for audio acquisition, the code based on the Arduino environment functions, and the first practical tests of reading from the A/D converter and writing to the D/A converter.

From digitized signal to sound: the D/A converter

In the second video, “Let’s listen to the voice from the DA converter”, the focus shifts to the D/A converter: the digitized human voice is played back, with an analysis of the resulting signal also on an oscilloscope. Pasquale also illustrates the changes to the schematic and the code needed to complete the acquisition-playback cycle.

Adapting the impedance with the internal op-amp

The third installment, “UNO R4: adapting the DAC impedance with the internal op-amp”, tackles a critical aspect: the output of the D/A converter has a fairly high impedance, so it is advisable to insert an adapter. Pasquale shows how to take advantage of the operational amplifier integrated into the board, both on the hardware connection side and on the firmware activation side, with a comparison of the noise before and after inserting the op-amp.

The electronic voice changer: the project synthesis

The last video, “Electronic voice changer”, puts all the previous pieces together to build a pitch shifter using the A/D and D/A converters of the UNO R4. The device can be used for audio effects or to alter the voice in situations where it must not be recognizable. Pasquale shows the updated wiring diagram, the test setup, several practical tests with voice and musical content, and finally the complete code.

The post Arduino UNO R4: A/D and D/A Converters for Audio, from Testing to a Voice Changer appeared first on Open Electronics.