5 ms·

Nano DIP: the smallest complete Arduino board 33 x 10mm

112 points by rolph 2y ago

jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
Cool as hell. It's kind of a shame the pins live in different places, so you can't put the board into the DIP slot on an actual uno. Not that there'd be a serious reason to do that.
jsnsisjw 2y ago
I don't get this, you use a dev board for ease of access. If you need a tiny footprint, just place the chip on your board O_o
- Already__Taken 2y ago
  there's a lot of applications where standard is more useful than custom, so size is a feature. costumes for example.
  - Kirby64 2y ago
    I'd think for custom MCUs integrated into something like costumes (or jewlery), that you'd look for smaller sizing. No need for a 'DIP' style package. You go castellated designs, or something where you solder wires to the pins directly. Much more compact. Saves you the time of doing PCB design, but still off-the-shelf enough.
    - metadat 2y ago
      What does 'DIP' stand for?
      - Kirby64 2y ago
        “Dual in-line package” which is the style of plastic packaging with two rows of pins intended for through hole PCB usage. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_in-line_package https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_in-line_package
        metadat 2y ago
        Ah, so it is related to a DIP switch. Thanks!
- ssl-3 2y ago
  It may seem irrational, but it's a bit of a leap to go from blinking an LED on a breadboard with an Arduino to blinking an LED with an ATtiny3217 (or whatever) soldered onto a custom PCB. I mean: Why re-implement an Arduino (and potentially do it badly) on a custom board, when one can just install a DIP socket on some protoboard and plug a relatively small widget like this in -- retaining all of the features that were useful in the beginning of the development process?
  - Panzer04 2y ago
    It's not that hard? You just need a programming header at this point. Do the Dev with a full size board, then get whoever your PCB mfg is to P&P the real chips for cents.
- Eisenstein 2y ago
  You can put this in a breadboard though.
  - xxs 2y ago
    ...and use the vertical USB plug. Weird.
    - shultays 2y ago
      Honestly sounds like it would do better than a horizontal one. It is always a struggle to plug usb to boards on breadboard
    - squarefoot 2y ago
      Yes, that is my main concern; an attached cable will put a lot of force on the pads and underlying tracks. I would consider sandwiching a small board with a plain horizontal connector soldered in.
- g15jv2dp 2y ago
  It's a fun challenge to miniaturize stuff. Not everything needs to be the most 100% uber efficient choice.
- bombela 2y ago
  For many small one off projects, you don't need enough ancillary components to require a dedicated PCB. Merely soldering a few pins to some buttons, LEDs, perhaps a ready made relay module etc. In this case, a perf board to hold everything together is more than sufficient. I made my own bathroom fan speed controller that react to humidity level by cobbling together some ready made modules, a few wires, LEDs, an arduino board and some Rust. It was much faster than making a dedicated PCB. In case you are curious, the fan is hidden away in the attic for noise isolation. The humidity sensor and an indicator LED lives in the intake grill above the shower. Connected via a few meters of ethernet cable running along the air duct to the control box. The sensor communicates via i2c. The control box adjusts the fan speed with a triac.
eternityforest 2y ago
It's really cool, but MicroUSB is a terrible connector. Other than that(And the fact that I only very rarely build anything without WiFi), it looks awesome. Most applications can just use the larger board, but for the ones that can't, this would sure beat a custom PCB just for a one off.
- TaylorAlexander 2y ago
  Also it’s an Attiny which just isn’t a very good processor. It has 2k of ram. Compare that to my favorite microcontroller, the 32 bit RP2040, which has 264k of ram! I used to use AVR and sometimes ATTiny processors (all 8 bit) but for the last ten years I’ve exclusively used 32 bit microcontrollers and lately it’s all the RP2040. I think someone had some fun doing a small layout, but I’d really never recommend anyone use this thing. A Raspberry Pi Pico (which hosts the RP2040) is $5. That one still quite annoyingly uses Micro USB, but there’s plenty of clones that use USB-C which are also $5 each, such as this one: https://a.co/d/0d1foa5f https://a.co/d/0d1foa5f
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >Attiny which just isn’t a very good processor. It has 2k of ram 2k RAM is huge for what most people need do with a microcontroller: read sensor, read push-button/potentiometer, turn on LED, spin motor/servo. The 20 year old gas heater at my parents place is run by one of those and that has a button/LED user interface and runs PID controllers and safety features. All that in 2k RAM. It's not enough to run Doom on it it stuff like that but the amount of consumer election with them out there is proof they're not underpowered in any way.
    - TaylorAlexander 2y ago
      Your commercial heater has code written by a professional engineer who understands the limitations of that system. I’ve been writing embedded systems code for 25 years, and I’m well aware of what can be done by an informed engineer with a limited system. But this isn’t about running doom. Any beginner that tries to use this system runs the risk of importing a library that carelessly consumes half their ram. If they want to use an I2C sensor with a specialized library, the random person on GitHub who wrote that library might not have optimized their code. If someone sees this board and wants to try it because it looks cute, it’s worth warning them that they’re buying a chip with a 20 year old architecture and extremely limited capabilities. The flew astronauts to the moon on machines with hand wired magnetic RAM. But if you can get a modern architecture with 264k of RAM for $5, it’s worth warning people that they’re looking at something that is extremely limited compared to other options. I also have some Twitter followers that seem to love micropython. You can’t even run micropython on attiny because of insufficient RAM. https://forum.micropython.org/viewtopic.php?t=9102 https://forum.micropython.org/viewtopic.php?t=9102 Or let’s say someone wants to run a rainbow pattern on an LED strip. Let’s say they’re using the SK6812 LEDs which are 21 bits per pixel. Let’s also say the rest of their code uses zero bytes of ram and the library is perfectly efficient. Well I hope they don’t try to control a light strip with more than 83 LEDs on it! That would consume all the RAM. If they get a high density LED strip with 244 LEDs per meter, then 83 LEDs represents a 34 centimeter long section of that strip. That’s 13 inches. People do lots of things with microcontrollers these days, and RAM is cheap and plentiful on modern chips.
hex4def6 2y ago
At a certain point, if you're going for "smallest", it's a bit of a cheat not to include Z-height, especially if you're relying on a vertical micro-USB connector in your design. 45x18=810 vs 33x10=330, great. But If you're adding another 5mm z-height for a connector, the volume is now kind of significant. Just think of the stack-up at this point: Motherboard + female socket (1.6mm + 5mm?) + daughterboard (1.6mm) + pins (5mm?) + vertical USB (5mm?). You're looking at something that's +/-18mm tall. Given that this whole design is basically just a way of attaching a 1mm tall IC to a design, that starts to feel a bit extreme if you care about size. If you really care about a tiny board, and don't need the DIP compatibility (or removability), I feel like a castellated design that can be soldered down is more useful. Designs like the Piksey Atto (20x13 = 260, but also something like 5mm tall) For me, the killer feature of not having the microcontroller soldered down is that you can flash something on a dev PC, and then insert it into the device. But in that case, I like something like the tinyduino, which eschews .1 headers and uses a B2B connector. More of a pain to deal with, but you get the benefit of tiny size + low z-height + removable: https://tinycircuits.com/products/tinyduino-processor-board https://tinycircuits.com/products/tinyduino-processor-board Regardless, more options are always better. But it's also useful to really think about what your requirements really are.
- Eisenstein 2y ago
  A lot of people like .1 headers because they can prototype with them using through-hole components and breadboards.
BMc2020 2y ago
OP, are there any parts on the bottom? The side picture has the headers hiding the bottom. Going by the schematic it looks like U3 is on the bottom. The reason I was wondering is that without the headers it would be easy to solder it to another pcb like a module. Very cool though, I hope it's a big hit.
Applejinx 2y ago
I love it. I've got multiple 'Radio Music/Chord Organ' Eurorack modules, which use a Teensy 3.2 to generate audio such as playing files from an SD card, or generating tones to be an oscillator. This (now-obsolete) Teensy has an onboard 12-bit DAC, which is used for the audio. I worked out how to pump up the sample rate to 300k and up, drastically reducing the aliasing for the simple tone generation. Works great: it's what expensive professional synths like the Novation Summit do. I don't know how many of these will be made and out there before it too goes away, but as somebody who's spent a lot of time playing with perfboard and CMOS chips and soldering music synthesizers and processors together, but who is not up to the task of doing that within an SMD context, Nano DIP is an astonishing hybrid of those two worlds. .1 headers gets you into a world where all sorts of things can be made from parts. I've even got a bunch of DIP ATTinys, the much more primitive ones used in the Bastl Kastle, for the same reason, but while those would also fit into that world, this is far more capable and run at high sample rate the 8-bit output is more impressive than you'd think: aliasing turns into an odd sort of harmonic distortion at very high sample rate. I hope this catches on, and I'm struggling not to just run off and buy a bunch of them even without a plan (when I haven't even used the Kastle-style ATTinys). As long as there are people with workshops full of vintage through-hole components and breadboards and perfboard etc. I hope there are projects like this that bridge the gap between that and the world of Arduino. Imagine one of these with even better ADCs and a DAC that's natively 16 bit but able to clock up to silly rates when used on simple waveform generation (never mind that pulse and square waves need only be 1 bit, and sawtooth waves use only 1 bit for their characteristic part). You'd have a DIP 'chip' that would work like a really expensive analog Eurorack oscillator, available for hacking prototypes together. Heck, this is probably already there. I hope synth makers jump on this project. It seems hard to predict which Arduino-world things continue to be available (crude ATTinys) and which do not (Teensy 3.2 with the 12-bit DAC).
selcuka 2y ago
Nice, but not that impressive when compared to similar boards: https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/Seeeduino-XIAO/ https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/Seeeduino-XIAO/ 20x17.5mm, ARM® Cortex®-M0+ 32bit 48MHz microcontroller(SAMD21G18) with 256KB Flash,32KB SRAM. https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/xiao_esp32s3_getting_started/ https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/xiao_esp32s3_getting_started/ 21x17.5mm, Xtensa LX7 dual-core, 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, On-chip 8M PSRAM & 8MB Flash.
Certified 2y ago
Impressive, but I can't foresee any project where I would pick this over the vastly more powerful PJRC Teensy 4.0 [1]. It is only slightly larger and only costs $3.85 more. [1] https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy40.html https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy40.html
omneity 2y ago
I like that the usb connector is vertical. I always found it more challenging than necessary to plug and unplug the cable when using a breadboard as its hard to get a grip on the cable and forces me to put the board on the breadboard's edges.

112 points by rolph 2y ago

Cool as hell. It's kind of a shame the pins live in different places, so you can't put the board into the DIP slot on an actual uno. Not that there'd be a serious reason to do that.

jsnsisjw 2y ago

I don't get this, you use a dev board for ease of access. If you need a tiny footprint, just place the chip on your board O_o

Already__Taken 2y ago
there's a lot of applications where standard is more useful than custom, so size is a feature. costumes for example.
- Kirby64 2y ago
  I'd think for custom MCUs integrated into something like costumes (or jewlery), that you'd look for smaller sizing. No need for a 'DIP' style package. You go castellated designs, or something where you solder wires to the pins directly. Much more compact. Saves you the time of doing PCB design, but still off-the-shelf enough.
  - metadat 2y ago
    What does 'DIP' stand for?
    - Kirby64 2y ago
      “Dual in-line package” which is the style of plastic packaging with two rows of pins intended for through hole PCB usage. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_in-line_package https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_in-line_package
      - metadat 2y ago
        Ah, so it is related to a DIP switch. Thanks!
ssl-3 2y ago
It may seem irrational, but it's a bit of a leap to go from blinking an LED on a breadboard with an Arduino to blinking an LED with an ATtiny3217 (or whatever) soldered onto a custom PCB. I mean: Why re-implement an Arduino (and potentially do it badly) on a custom board, when one can just install a DIP socket on some protoboard and plug a relatively small widget like this in -- retaining all of the features that were useful in the beginning of the development process?
- Panzer04 2y ago
  It's not that hard? You just need a programming header at this point. Do the Dev with a full size board, then get whoever your PCB mfg is to P&P the real chips for cents.
Eisenstein 2y ago
You can put this in a breadboard though.
- xxs 2y ago
  ...and use the vertical USB plug. Weird.
  - shultays 2y ago
    Honestly sounds like it would do better than a horizontal one. It is always a struggle to plug usb to boards on breadboard
  - squarefoot 2y ago
    Yes, that is my main concern; an attached cable will put a lot of force on the pads and underlying tracks. I would consider sandwiching a small board with a plain horizontal connector soldered in.
g15jv2dp 2y ago
It's a fun challenge to miniaturize stuff. Not everything needs to be the most 100% uber efficient choice.
bombela 2y ago
For many small one off projects, you don't need enough ancillary components to require a dedicated PCB. Merely soldering a few pins to some buttons, LEDs, perhaps a ready made relay module etc. In this case, a perf board to hold everything together is more than sufficient. I made my own bathroom fan speed controller that react to humidity level by cobbling together some ready made modules, a few wires, LEDs, an arduino board and some Rust. It was much faster than making a dedicated PCB. In case you are curious, the fan is hidden away in the attic for noise isolation. The humidity sensor and an indicator LED lives in the intake grill above the shower. Connected via a few meters of ethernet cable running along the air duct to the control box. The sensor communicates via i2c. The control box adjusts the fan speed with a triac.

eternityforest 2y ago

It's really cool, but MicroUSB is a terrible connector. Other than that(And the fact that I only very rarely build anything without WiFi), it looks awesome. Most applications can just use the larger board, but for the ones that can't, this would sure beat a custom PCB just for a one off.

TaylorAlexander 2y ago
Also it’s an Attiny which just isn’t a very good processor. It has 2k of ram. Compare that to my favorite microcontroller, the 32 bit RP2040, which has 264k of ram! I used to use AVR and sometimes ATTiny processors (all 8 bit) but for the last ten years I’ve exclusively used 32 bit microcontrollers and lately it’s all the RP2040. I think someone had some fun doing a small layout, but I’d really never recommend anyone use this thing. A Raspberry Pi Pico (which hosts the RP2040) is $5. That one still quite annoyingly uses Micro USB, but there’s plenty of clones that use USB-C which are also $5 each, such as this one: https://a.co/d/0d1foa5f https://a.co/d/0d1foa5f
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >Attiny which just isn’t a very good processor. It has 2k of ram 2k RAM is huge for what most people need do with a microcontroller: read sensor, read push-button/potentiometer, turn on LED, spin motor/servo. The 20 year old gas heater at my parents place is run by one of those and that has a button/LED user interface and runs PID controllers and safety features. All that in 2k RAM. It's not enough to run Doom on it it stuff like that but the amount of consumer election with them out there is proof they're not underpowered in any way.
  - TaylorAlexander 2y ago
    Your commercial heater has code written by a professional engineer who understands the limitations of that system. I’ve been writing embedded systems code for 25 years, and I’m well aware of what can be done by an informed engineer with a limited system. But this isn’t about running doom. Any beginner that tries to use this system runs the risk of importing a library that carelessly consumes half their ram. If they want to use an I2C sensor with a specialized library, the random person on GitHub who wrote that library might not have optimized their code. If someone sees this board and wants to try it because it looks cute, it’s worth warning them that they’re buying a chip with a 20 year old architecture and extremely limited capabilities. The flew astronauts to the moon on machines with hand wired magnetic RAM. But if you can get a modern architecture with 264k of RAM for $5, it’s worth warning people that they’re looking at something that is extremely limited compared to other options. I also have some Twitter followers that seem to love micropython. You can’t even run micropython on attiny because of insufficient RAM. https://forum.micropython.org/viewtopic.php?t=9102 https://forum.micropython.org/viewtopic.php?t=9102 Or let’s say someone wants to run a rainbow pattern on an LED strip. Let’s say they’re using the SK6812 LEDs which are 21 bits per pixel. Let’s also say the rest of their code uses zero bytes of ram and the library is perfectly efficient. Well I hope they don’t try to control a light strip with more than 83 LEDs on it! That would consume all the RAM. If they get a high density LED strip with 244 LEDs per meter, then 83 LEDs represents a 34 centimeter long section of that strip. That’s 13 inches. People do lots of things with microcontrollers these days, and RAM is cheap and plentiful on modern chips.

hex4def6 2y ago

At a certain point, if you're going for "smallest", it's a bit of a cheat not to include Z-height, especially if you're relying on a vertical micro-USB connector in your design. 45x18=810 vs 33x10=330, great. But If you're adding another 5mm z-height for a connector, the volume is now kind of significant. Just think of the stack-up at this point: Motherboard + female socket (1.6mm + 5mm?) + daughterboard (1.6mm) + pins (5mm?) + vertical USB (5mm?). You're looking at something that's +/-18mm tall. Given that this whole design is basically just a way of attaching a 1mm tall IC to a design, that starts to feel a bit extreme if you care about size. If you really care about a tiny board, and don't need the DIP compatibility (or removability), I feel like a castellated design that can be soldered down is more useful. Designs like the Piksey Atto (20x13 = 260, but also something like 5mm tall) For me, the killer feature of not having the microcontroller soldered down is that you can flash something on a dev PC, and then insert it into the device. But in that case, I like something like the tinyduino, which eschews .1 headers and uses a B2B connector. More of a pain to deal with, but you get the benefit of tiny size + low z-height + removable: https://tinycircuits.com/products/tinyduino-processor-board https://tinycircuits.com/products/tinyduino-processor-board Regardless, more options are always better. But it's also useful to really think about what your requirements really are.

Eisenstein 2y ago
A lot of people like .1 headers because they can prototype with them using through-hole components and breadboards.

BMc2020 2y ago

OP, are there any parts on the bottom? The side picture has the headers hiding the bottom. Going by the schematic it looks like U3 is on the bottom. The reason I was wondering is that without the headers it would be easy to solder it to another pcb like a module. Very cool though, I hope it's a big hit.

Applejinx 2y ago

I love it. I've got multiple 'Radio Music/Chord Organ' Eurorack modules, which use a Teensy 3.2 to generate audio such as playing files from an SD card, or generating tones to be an oscillator. This (now-obsolete) Teensy has an onboard 12-bit DAC, which is used for the audio. I worked out how to pump up the sample rate to 300k and up, drastically reducing the aliasing for the simple tone generation. Works great: it's what expensive professional synths like the Novation Summit do. I don't know how many of these will be made and out there before it too goes away, but as somebody who's spent a lot of time playing with perfboard and CMOS chips and soldering music synthesizers and processors together, but who is not up to the task of doing that within an SMD context, Nano DIP is an astonishing hybrid of those two worlds. .1 headers gets you into a world where all sorts of things can be made from parts. I've even got a bunch of DIP ATTinys, the much more primitive ones used in the Bastl Kastle, for the same reason, but while those would also fit into that world, this is far more capable and run at high sample rate the 8-bit output is more impressive than you'd think: aliasing turns into an odd sort of harmonic distortion at very high sample rate. I hope this catches on, and I'm struggling not to just run off and buy a bunch of them even without a plan (when I haven't even used the Kastle-style ATTinys). As long as there are people with workshops full of vintage through-hole components and breadboards and perfboard etc. I hope there are projects like this that bridge the gap between that and the world of Arduino. Imagine one of these with even better ADCs and a DAC that's natively 16 bit but able to clock up to silly rates when used on simple waveform generation (never mind that pulse and square waves need only be 1 bit, and sawtooth waves use only 1 bit for their characteristic part). You'd have a DIP 'chip' that would work like a really expensive analog Eurorack oscillator, available for hacking prototypes together. Heck, this is probably already there. I hope synth makers jump on this project. It seems hard to predict which Arduino-world things continue to be available (crude ATTinys) and which do not (Teensy 3.2 with the 12-bit DAC).

selcuka 2y ago

Nice, but not that impressive when compared to similar boards: https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/Seeeduino-XIAO/ https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/Seeeduino-XIAO/ 20x17.5mm, ARM® Cortex®-M0+ 32bit 48MHz microcontroller(SAMD21G18) with 256KB Flash,32KB SRAM. https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/xiao_esp32s3_getting_started/ https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/xiao_esp32s3_getting_started/ 21x17.5mm, Xtensa LX7 dual-core, 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, On-chip 8M PSRAM & 8MB Flash.

Certified 2y ago

Impressive, but I can't foresee any project where I would pick this over the vastly more powerful PJRC Teensy 4.0 [1]. It is only slightly larger and only costs $3.85 more. [1] https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy40.html https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy40.html

omneity 2y ago

I like that the usb connector is vertical. I always found it more challenging than necessary to plug and unplug the cable when using a breadboard as its hard to get a grip on the cable and forces me to put the board on the breadboard's edges.