Arduino News

The Arduino team announced their new GSM communications shield.

Availability was via the Arduino store at 69 euros + VAT but quickly sold out.  Compatibility is stated as the Arduino Uno R3, Mega R3, and Leonardo.

Thoughts:

1. It's pricey, even if one gets a data only SIM card.
2. The lack of Due compatibility is troublesome.

In other news, the Arduino development IDE was updated to release 1.0.4.  Changes listed are:

[core]

* Fixed malloc bug (Paul Stoffregen)

[libraries]

* Fixed memory leak when calling Ethernet.begin() multiple times.
* Fixed SD example listfiles.ino
* Fixed a lot of Esplora examples
* Added GSM library

[environment]

* Sort entries in preferences.txt (Shigeru Kanemoto)
* Fixed some wrong translations
* Fixed NPE due to permissions IO error
* Updated drivers for Windows (all-in-one, signature for Win8)

[bootloaders]

* Fixed a bunch of bugs on Mega2560's bootloader (Mark Sproul)
  (https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/pull/1183)

The Esplora examples were updated but I noted some additional errors not caught - see my post on the Arduino forum at http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,153610.0.html for more.