Standard Arduino boards are limited by memory and pin number. You can grab Arduino mega to push a bit forward but bigger project may force you to thing again. Jon Moeller didn’t waste a time and started a project of different microcontroller platform. His aim was to make it flexible, still Arduino compatible and be more powerful. His choice was to use Cypress PsoC 5 microcontroller which comes with 60 general purpose I/O pins and additional 8 with high current output capability – total 68.

Great thing about FreeSoC is that each pin can be configured for any interface. Weather you may have 24 SPI or set them to be 20-bit ADC. Chip can be configured graphically using Cypress design software. In other aspects Cypress PsoC 5 microcontroller is nothing more than ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller. Layout looks interesting – you can see half of it look like Arduino but another half gives freedom. You are not limited to Arduino shield stacking only. It also comes in a smaller board version called freeSoC Mini which fits in to 40-pin DIP socket.