Arduino micro development shield


Description
A tiny and ultra low cost development board for Arduino projects

Features

  • Ultra low cost (~1000mm2 board area – fit as many as possible on a single fr4 substrate)
  • Arduino compatible pin spacing
  • Easy to build (even at home – single sided PCB)
  • Extra VCC and GND tracks
  • Pinout (printed pin names)
  • Does not block LEDs and reset key on the Arduino shield

Development

For my first Arduino projects I just used pin headers and soldered wires and components directly. This works ok for early development, but gets messy quite fast. It is also difficult to switch and store different projects using nothing but pin headers since they are fragile and it is not always obvious where each pin header goes. One option is to use a complete development shield, but they are often overkill for smaller hacks.

I decided to create a smaller development shield. The solution was to use Occam’s razor and cut away everything in the middle of a standard development shield. The downside is that you have two PCBs instead of one. The advantage is that you can make several of them using the same board space. Another advantage is that the development board does not block LEDs, ICSP, switches, etc on the Arduino.

Less than an hour was spent on making the 2D lines in Rhino. Then a few minutes to set up the mill to produce 10 boards, engraved, drilled, cut and ready to use! Read more details about the process here.

Specification
Dimensions [mm]: 44.5×27 (WxD)

Version tracker
0.1        First version
0.2        added VCC and GND
0.3        added text
0.4        added cutting paths (current version)
Future     No updates planned…

Caution
The CNC files below for controlling the mill is for reference only. It is very unlikely that your mill is configured exactly like mine. Position of zero, cutting speeds, position of tools etc is most likely different. Running unknown code on expensive and powerful machines is not recommended. I do not take any responsibility if the machine damage itself or worse, someone.


Documents
Rhino project file (2D lines)
2D export (.svg)
Neutral drill file (drill positions)
Neutral engrave file (engrave paths)
Neutral release file (3mm cutter paths)

See also (coming soon…)
Arduino development board

Licensing
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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