The Lilypad does not have a USB connection, and you must use a separate
adaptor to program it. It has an exceptionally beautiful design.
Adafruit also sell a board called the Flora, which is similar in concept to the
Lilypad.
Other “Official” Boards
The previously described Arduino boards are the most useful and popular ones.
However, the range of Arduino boards constantly changes, so for a complete and
up-to-date picture of the Arduino family, see the official Arduino website list at
[Link]/en/Main/Hardware .
Arduino Clones and Variants
Unofficial boards fall into two categories. Some just take the standard open
source hardware designs of Arduino and build a cheaper one. Some names you
can search for boards of this nature include the following:
♦ The Sparkfun RedBoard
♦ The Adafruit Metro
♦ The Olimexino
More interestingly, some Arduino-compatible designs are intended to extend
or improve the Arduino in some way. New variants are appearing all the time,
and far too many exist to mention them all. However, the following are some of
the more interesting and popular variants:
♦ The Node MCU board, which is based around the ESP8266 WiFi System
on a chip. This provides a very low-cost solution for projects where you
need a WiFi connection for your Arduino. See Ch. 10 for more
information.
♦ Adafruit Trinket, a very small Arduino.
♦ Freetronics EtherTen, an Arduino with built-in Ethernet.
♦ Particle Photon, a low-cost board with WiFi. It is programmed over the
Internet using Arduino C but with a Web-based IDE rather than the
