Friday, April 15, 2011

Petitduino, another breadboard friendly Arduino

 This is my attend to build a small and simple yet complete version of the Arduino.  Browsing the Internet I found quite a few versions of Arduinos; the Freeduino page has an impressive list of very exotic variants. Also there are already very similar boards for sale, it was very rewarding and instructing to come-up with a design optimized for my needs.  What I wanted is a board easy to mount on a breadboard and also pluggable into standard IC sockets for projects (this time the Arduino is the Shield).

All the components can be hand soldered, the circuit has one side only and the traces are wide enough to be printed with the hot iron method. This is a real "Do It Yourself" version of everyone's favorite controller.
Programming is done with a FTDI cable or FTDI adapter. There is a LM7805 to convert supply voltage to 5 volts; however even if the crystal is 16Hz, it seems that the ATMEGA328 will accept to run with 3.3v. 

Now I plan to build a few boards and leave them embedded in all the projects I have around.