The Arduino Esplora is a microcontroller board derived from the Arduino Leonardo. The Esplora differs from all preceding boards in that it provides a number of built-in, ready-to-use set of onboard sensors for interaction. The Esplora has onboard sound and light output interfaces. It alos has the potential to expand its capabilities with two Tinkerkit input and output connectors, and a socket for a color TFT LCD screen. Like the Leonardo board, the Esplora uses an Atmega32U4 AVR microcontroller with 16 MHz crystal oscillator and a micro USB connection capable of acting as a USB client device, like a mouse or a keyboard.

The Esplora has the following on-board inputs and outputs :

• Analog joystick with central push-button two axis (X and Y) and a center pushbutton.
• 4 push-buttons laid out in a diamond pattern.
• Linear potentiometer slider near the bottom of the board.
• Microphone for getting the loudness (amplitude) of the surrounding environment.
• Light sensor for getting the brightness.
• Temperature sensor reads the ambient temperature
• Three-axis accelerometer measures the board's relation to gravity on three axes (X, Y, and Z)
• Buzzer can produce square-waves.
• RGB led bright LED with Red Green and Blue elements for color mixing.
• 2 TinkerKit Inputs to connect the TinkerKit sensor modules with the 3-pin connectors.
• 2 TinkerKit Outputs to connect the TinkerKit actuator modules with the 3-pin connectors.
• TFT display connector connector for an optional color LCD screen, SD card, or other devices that use the SPI protocol.