Atmel AVR Hero Consumer Electronic Design Contest

The Are You an AVR Hero? Contest kicked off at Maker Faire a few weeks ago.  Maker Faire is over, but you can still enter you design until December 31, 2013.  This is a Facebook contest and half of the judging criteria is public votes, so you want to enter early.  The other criteria are quality of the idea, quality of the device design, and commercial potential. Here is a link to the official rules.  Click here to vote on a design and click here to enter.

At the time of writing, the design with the most votes (83) is an LED Matrix Tic-tac-toe game using an AVR ATtiny85 on a solderless breadboard.

New Arduino Features 1GHz Texas Instruments Processor

The Arduino TRE Board is coming soon, an official Arduino open source prototyping platform.  Announced today on the TI E2E community site as the most powerful Arduino available to date.  It features the Texas Instruments Sitara AM3359 ARM Cortex-A8 processor.  This is the same processor used on TI's BeagleBone Black. It is clocked at 1GHz, and the board also has 512MB 800MHz DDR3, HDMI, 4-ports of  USB, audio I/O, XBee RF module Connectors and lots of I/O.  For Arduino shield compatibility, it has the shield connectors and also an Atmel ATmega32u4.  This board will also run embedded Linux. It is targeted to prototyping 3D printers, networking hubs for building control, lighting and telemetry, and DIY projects that require more processing power.