Over at the LVL1 hackerspace in Lousiville, [Brad] is putting together a workshop on etching PCBs at home. [Brad] wanted all the participants to take home something cool, so he settled on an Arduino clone as the workshop’s project.
The clone [Brad] used is the Nanino, a single-sided board we’ve seen before. Unfortunately, there aren’t any CAD files for the Nanino and doing a toner transfer with the existing PDFs was a pain. This led [Brad] to redraw the Nanino in Diptrace and put the files up for everyone to grab.
In his workshop, [Brad] is going to be using a laser printer, hydrogen peroxide, and HCl. one of the most common setups for home etching. If you’re in the Louisville area, you can make your own Nanino with a home etching workshop on March 16th. Be careful, though: those LVL1 guys are pretty weird; they have a moat and are building a homicidal AI.
I can see DipTrace gets popular. That’s good. : )
What do I have to do to get one of these?
Another option for single-sided Arduino compatibles is a Metaboard by Metalab. Made myself one somewhere around 2008, with stock PNGs, and it still works. I think the CAD files are in Eagle, since I can’t open them. :D
The biggest difference, mentioned on the page above, is that “AVR’s UART lines are not used for USB. This means that they can be used for other purposes, but also that debug output written to the UART cannot be directly received via USB.”
Just for your infos. I think if I was making one these days, I’d do Brad’s version. Looks simpler.