Above is the smallest Arduino-compatible board yet, measuring only 21x14mm. Sporting the ATmega328P, it has the same processing power as the Arduino Uno. There’s also an on-board voltage regulator and serial header for programming.
This article has been copied over from my old blog, niekproductions.com. Please excuse any mistakes.
Since I’m on a student budget, I couldn’t afford to leave an actual Arduino into my projects, so I designed, etched and assembled the BareDuino classic. I can quickly throw one into a project without having to worry about using an expensive regular Arduino.
Using the experience I earned from the original BareDuino, I started the BareDuino Nano project at the age of 13. I saw Fabio Varesano’s Femtoduino and really liked the idea, so I set myself the challenge of making it even smaller. Needless to say I’ve succeeded. In order to make it smaller, I had to use 0402 resistors and capacitors (which were a pain to hand-solder) and use 1.27mm spaced headers.
Because I was working with such small components, I had to use solderpaste and a soldering oven to get it right. For assembling earlier revisions, I tried to apply the solderpaste by hand but it just wouldn’t work well enough/at all. Eventually I went over to a nearby FabLab and laser-cut some stencils for applying the solder paste. Here’s a video of the process.
At the beginning of July, Seeed Studio started manufacturing and selling my BareDuino Nano! It was really nice working with them. There were a couple of errors on my side, but they helped me solve them. My next product will be an adapter to make programming the BareDuino Nano easier.