The New Arduino MKR WAN 1310

Released at Maker Faire in New York two years ago, the Arduino MKR WAN 1300 was one of the first boards released after the resolution of the protracted legal battles around the Arduino trademark.

Say “hello” to its replacement, the new Arduino MKR WAN 1310.

Based around the same Microchip SAM D21 micro-controller and MuRata CMWZIZZABZ low-power LoRa module as its predecessor, it shares the same Microchip ECC508 as the rest of the MKR family of board. However the new board now has battery charging circuitry, and an improved low power architecture that should extend battery life, reducing the power envelope down to as little as 104 μA when properly configured.

The board also comes with 2MB of on-board SPI Flash, which significantly improve the ability to carry out data logging or carry out Over the Air (OTA) updates to the board.

Both the newly reduced power budget, and the on-board flash memory, are big bonuses for developers looking to use this board to develop for the Internet of Things.

While the Arduino classic form factor is going to be around for a long time, we all know it is dying. That the Uno-like boards that became a de facto standard in the maker world are now quietly on the way out, and although the ‘legacy’ Uno form factor isn’t going away any time soon, most of the newer boards from Arduino have been in the slimmed down MKR format.

However, the MKR form factor is losing out to Adafruit’s Feather form factor in the battle to be community’s next default micro-controller board standard. So it’s really good to see Arduino take a step back and look at how to make this board at lot more useful for developers. Especially as some people were wondering about the fate of the MKR range after the surprising release of a new family of Nano boards earlier in the year.

Yet the main feature of this board, over other available Arduino boards, is its support for LoRa. The main differentiator for LoRa over the other competing low-power, low-bandwidth, and long-range protocol standards for the Internet of Things is that it is the only one where you can build out a network from scratch without relying on any third-party providers. Which should make it a good fit for the open source Arduino. But the company has always covered their bets when it comes to the low-powered wireless standards wars, announcing MKR boards supporting Sigfox,NB-IoT, and of course LoRaWAN, all three of the main competing standards.

So it’s going to be interesting to see whether we see similar specifications bumps to the MKR Fox 1200 or the MKR NB 1500. If not, we might well be seeing Arduino finally throwing it’s hat in the ring when it comes to that standards war. At least, if the release of the Arduino Pro Gateway for LoRa hadn’t already sort of signaledthat.

The new Arduino MKR WAN 1310 is available now from the Arduino Store for $37.95 (€33.00) with tax and shipping on top.