Arduino's Silicon Labs MGM240S-Powered Arduino Nano Matter Launches as a Fully-Fledged Dev Board

The Arduino Nano Matter Internet of Things (IoT) development board, developed in partnership with Silicon Labs, has officially launched — following its early release as a "community preview" earlier this year.

"Nano Matter merges Arduino's signature ease of use with with the powerful Silicon Labs® MGM240S, wrapping the best of two worlds into one of the smallest form factors currently on the market," the Arduino team explains of its latest development board. "With Nano Matter, makers — at all levels of expertise — can leverage the popular Matter IoT connectivity standard to build interactive solutions, upgrade previous Nano-based projects to fully function as smart home devices, and even experiment with protocols like Zigbee and OpenThread."

Arduino announced that it had partnered with Silicon Labs to make it easier to experiment with the Matter smart home connectivity standard back in January this year, previewing the Arduino Nano Matter board design during Arduino Days 2024 a couple of months later. A small quantity of boards were made available under a "community preview" program — and now the company is ready to make the device more generally available.

The retail version of the Arduino Nano Matter board is built around the SiLabs MGM240SD22VNA microcontroller, which includes a single 32-bit Arm Cortex-M33 core running at up to 78MHz and digital signal processing (DSP) and floating-point unit (FPU) acceleration. There's 256kB of static RAM (SRAM) and a generous 1,536kB of flash memory, plus IEEE 802.15.4 and Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy (BLE) radios — the former supporting Thread, among other protocols, and the latter including Bluetooth Mesh support.

The breadboard-friendly design includes 22 exposed general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, all of which support external interrupts and pulse-width modulation (PWM) output — though only five PWM outputs can be used simultaneously. 20 pins can act as inputs to a 12-bit analog to digital converter (ADC), with four offering digital-to-analog conversion (DAC) at 8- to 12-bit resolution. Each pin can source 40mA and sink 28mA at 3.3V, Arduino says.

The Arduino Nano Matter's primary selling point, though, is not its GPIO connectivity but its support for Matter — delivering, Arduino says, a quick-start platform for building a range of Matter-compatible projects, from heating and ventilation control to smart home assistants. The board also includes Serial Wire Debugging over its USB Type-C interface, without the need for an external debugging probe, in addition to power and data.

The Arduino Nano Matter is now available to order from the Arduino Store at $19.90; more information can be found in Arduino's product documentation, including tutorials for building a smart relay, smart fan, temperature sensor, and an RGB smart light — though only the latter is on-track to receive official Matter certification, Arduino has confirmed.