Now Let’s See The World’s Largest Arduino

A few days ago we saw what would have been a killer Kickstarter a few years ago. It was the smallest conceivable ATtiny85 microcontroller board, with resistors, diodes, a USB connector, and eight pins for plugging into a breadboard. It’s a shame this design wasn’t around for the great Arduino Minification of Kickstarter in late 2011; it would have easily netted a few hundred thousand dollars, a TED talk, and a TechCrunch biopic.

[AtomSoftTech] has thrown his gauntlet down and created an even smaller ‘tiny85 board. it measures 0.4in by 0.3in, including the passives, reset switch, and USB connector. To put that in perspective, the PDIP package of the ‘tiny85 measures 0.4 x 0.4. How is [Atom] getting away with this? Cheating, splitting the circuit onto two stacked boards, or knowing the right components, depending on how you look at it.

USB [Atom] is using a few interesting components in this build. The USB connector is a surface mount vertical part, making the USB cord stick out the top of this uC board. The reset button is extremely small as well, sticking out of the interior layer of the PCB sandwich.

[AtomSoft] has the project up on OSH Park ($1.55 for three. How cool is that?), and we assume he’ll be selling the official World’s Smallest Arduino-compatible board at Tindie in time.

28 thoughts on “Now Let’s See The World’s Largest Arduino

    1. For use on a breadboard footprint is what matters. Using vertical USB connector is absolutely brilliant since the USB cable covers part of the breadboard when mounted in a horizontal connector. The ‘tiny85 PCB is a bit smaller in total area and hence cheaper ($0.95 vs $1.55) but you will need to hack the PCB to build it. This design is much cleaner.

  1. World’s largest Arduino might be a Virtex-7 with 2K balls and 2M LUTs running more than a thousand AVR8 cores at a few hundred megahertz each. That would be quite an achievement on the ‘because I can’ front. Any batters stepping up to the plate? (or willing to send me a V7 EVM!)

    1. LMAO i remember that guy. The only way to make this smaller is to decap it probably. But since i cant do that (yet) perhaps someone else can but then its not really mass produce-able. How about buying the DIE straight from Atmel? Would be cool!

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