Arduino for Beginners: Lattepanda - Powerful Win10 with on-board Arduino

Monday, December 19, 2016

Lattepanda - Powerful Win10 with on-board Arduino

Lattepanda on plywood casing

LattePanda was launch on Kickstarter on Dec 2015 as the "A Windows 10 Computer for Everything" and was successfully funded 4 times the pledged amount.

Lattepanda specs

A quick glance at the specs, it is very similar to some 7" Intel Atom tablet hardware running on the Intel Atom Cherry Trail Z8300 quad-core 1840 Mhz CPU , 2GB/4GB DDR3 RAM, with an Intel Gen8 GPU, 32GB/64GB eMMC storage with an Arduino Atmega32U4 ( Leonardo ) directly connected to the CPU.

On top of the usual stuff, below are some extrra worth mentioned :-

1 x USB3.0 port
Bluetooth 4.0
WIFI 802.11n
Serial port to the Intel chip
Serial port to Arduino
I2C to Intel chip
2 x GPIO to Intel chip
Display connector ( for 7" display )
touchscreen connector ( for 7" display )
and also an audio jack

My review unit was a 2GB RAM with 32GB storage that runs Win 10 32-bit version that comes with a nice looking open source laser cut plywood case with reset and power buttons.

Lattepaanda side view

Lattepanda top view

Heatsink are recommended for the shielding plate where the Intel Atom is located. DFRobot included a few pieces of small copper heatsinks.

The great thing about this product is that it is pre-installed with an Activated Windows 10, just connect power, HDMI monitor, keyboard and mouse and "ready to run"..

Once power up, Windows 10 welcomes lattepanda to the operating system ...

Windows 10 welcomes lattepanda !!!!

An Arduino version 1.0.6 is also included in the Windows 10 for a ready to blink "Hello World" without any extra software downloads. This is a really nice feature.

Win10 also welcome Arduino

As many people was asking me about the hardware specs, I will post some of the Device Manager details ..

Lattepanda Device Manager

Lattepanda Hardware Monitor

The CPU do get pretty hot, so I removed the back cover and installed the included pure copper heatsinks that come together with the package.

Lattepanda bottom view with heatsinks

My overall impression was pretty good and this is a value for money for a small and powerful computer inside a cute plywood casing (there is also an acrylic version of the case) with an on-board Arduino too!!! It have plug and play sensor connectors too. Even when the Win10 is powered off, the Arduino is still running as I run the Blink examples to blink the blue on-board LED.