For some Arduino projects, you don’t actually need that many IO pins. That’s exactly the case when I tried to build a simple RGB throwie that would cycle through colours. I was looking for a cheaper alternative to the Arduino UNO’s ATmega328P when I stumbled across this post by MIT’s High-Low Tech lab. They developed a library for programming the 8-pins ATtiny45/85 from the Arduino IDE. It’s a very smart solution to use permanently in some low pin-usage projects, but you still need to hook up individual wires from your programmer to the ATtiny to be able to program it. That’s when I came up with the idea of the BareDuino Micro.
This article has been copied over from my old blog, niekproductions.com. Please excuse any mistakes.
The BareDuino Micro solves this problem. It’s got an ATtiny45 or 85, on-board ISP header for easy reprogramming, a power LED and battery connections. The pins are all broken out in the same way as the DIP packaged ATtiny, so you can easily plug it into a breadboard. I originally designed the board for a personal project, but the design files are available at the GitHub repository. I still have some unpopulated PCB’s lying around.