The latest Arduino creation from Italy has been released and we're now allowed to talk about it - the Arduino Leonardo. We've got a limited amount in stock now! on order which have left Italy and are winging there way to us as we speak. They should be here in around a week or 10 days.

The interesting thing about the Leonardo is that rather than having a separate chip/controller to talk USB to the computer it's all based on one micro-controller - the ATmega32u4. This keeps the price down and also allows some really neat things, like acting as a USB keyboard/mouse amongst many others. The Arduino Leonardo getting started guide is a great read and will fill you in on all the details along with a few tricks.

Along with the Arduino Leonardo comes a new maintenance release of the Arduino Development Environment (IDE) - 1.0.1 - here's the official announcement.

The main features of the Arduino 1.0.1 release are support for the Leonardo and some new translations. Apart from that there are a bunch of bug fixes so it's a recommend upgrade for everyone. Here are a couple of the bug fixes that are interesting for our usage here;

• Issue 716: DHCP lease handling - this is a big one if you work with DHCP environments and want to start using the built in DHCP support of the Ethernet library from 1.0+
• Issue 454: Add Stream.readString() and Stream.readStringUntil() that return String instances - the String objects are a time saving and convenient features so it's good to see more options for using them.
• Issue 728: Core support for ATmega1284P - the ATmega1284P (and Atmega644P) are great chips which deserve to be included in the main distribution.

Thanks for reading and keeping us here running around mad trying to keep up with everything!