Ah, Arduino and LattePanda coming together at last. What could be better? Well along with the fact that your LattePanda is a fully fledged Windows 10 computer so you can program any Arduino board you want as normal, one of the best things about LattePanda is the Atmega32u4 chip that’s on board. That’s right, you get a fully functioning AVR chip with the Arduino bootloader on it to use in all its glory. If you're not familiar with LattePanda yet, be sure to check out our What is LattePanda tutorial for more info. Every version of LattePanda comes with the onboard Arduino chip, however, we use the 4G/64GB version The Atmega32u4 is the same chip as used on the Makey Makey, Leonardo, and other Arduino boards due to its built-in USB port. So enough about how much we love the LattePanda, and let’s take a look at get it up and running with some code!
Fortunately, using the onboard Arduino chip is even easier than using a standard Arduino because you don’t have to connect any cables. Power on your LattePanda and open up the Arduino IDE. We won’t be going into the specifics of using the Arduino IDE here as that’s already been covered in depth in our Arduino specific tutorials.
As the Atmega32u4 is the chip used in the Arduino Leonardo board, we need to select that as our board from the drop down list and ensure that the COM port is selected. And that’s all there is to it folks, you don’t need to connect or configure anything, it just works, straight away. That’s the beauty of LattePanda, it’s all integrated into the one board.
The LattePanda breaks out the Atmega32u4 pins in a convenient standard 0.1" female header found on the top of the board (U2). There's also access to the pins via the 3-pin sensor headers on the bottom of the board which is designed to easily connect to other DFRobot sensor modules. There's also header access to GPIO pins on the Intel Atom chip (U1), however, that's a tutorial for another time.
So if you’re looking to get started with writing some code for Arduino, check out our Arduino tutorials linked to above, and we’d love to see some of the stuff our maker community is creating with LattePanda, so get the conversation started below!
