[Morten] works very fast. He has already designed, fabbed, populated, and tested a breakout board for the new tiniest microcontroller on the market, and he’s even made a video about it, embedded below.
You might have heard about this new TI ARM Cortex MO micro on these very pages, where we asked you what you’d do with this grain-of-rice-sized chunk of thinking sand. (The number one answer was “sneeze and lose it in the carpet”.)
From the video, it looks like [Morten] would design a breakout board using Kicad 8, populate it, get it blinking, and then use its I2C lines to make a simple digital thermometer demo. In the video, he shows how he worked with the part, from making a custom footprint to spending quite a while nudging it into place before soldering it carefully down.
But he nailed it on the first try, and honestly it doesn’t look nearly as intimidating as we’d feared, mostly because of the two-row layout of the balls. It actually looks easy enough to fan out. Because you can’t inspect the soldering work underneath the chip, he broke out all of the lines to a header to make it quick to check for shorts between those tiny little balls. Smart.
We love to see people trying out the newest hotness. Let us know down in the comments what new parts you’re trying out.
Thanks [Clint] for the tip!
Could have made a PCB the size of a DIP-8 package, then we could plug it into a breadboard.
^this………………………………………….
That’s my plan when I can get my hands on some. Still in preproduction and stock seems to be super limited.
I dunno what you’re searching for, but the plug and play dev kit is in stock at Mouser for $8 a unit.
I got one direct from TI, it has a much larger MSPM0 mcu on it. Fine for development but I still want to make a DIP-8 adapter for the smallest MCU. Why? IDK it’s funny I guess. Software 555 Emulator?
Idea: Also add castellations on the outside, so it can be soldered on another PCB without additional connectors.
Or ya know… just order it in any of these available packages.
20-pin TSSOP (PW)
20-pin VSSOP (DGS)
20-pin WQFN (RUK)
16-pin SOT (DYY)
8-pin SOT (DDF)
8-pin WSON (DSG)
Indeed. It’s quite silly to fumble with “the world’s smallest microcontroller” and then put it on a big empty PCB like that. If you want to experiment with small stuff, then the “soldering challenge” boards with different sized LED’s are a much better option.
For KiCad, it does not matter. It works with nano meter resolution, and with that it’s has more resolution than any PCB manufacturer or SMT placement machine has.
Also, KiCad used to work with 32 bit integers, which resulted in a maximum PCB size of (approx) 4 by 4 meters. KiCad is transitioning to 64 bit integers (Either in V9 or planned for V10), which results any practical limit for maximum PCB size.
Who makes a 4m x 4m PCB, and how do they post them?
This. Thanks for the chuckle 😁
Most irrelevant tick box ever, especially for hackers.
Oh don’t worry, there’s a hammer for that particular nail… https://www.elektormagazine.com/news/world-s-longest-pcb
OSH Park has a minimum of 0.5 x 0.5 inch. I have designed multiple boards to fit into a “panel” of that size. Their ENIG surface doesn’t solder particularly well for these kind of BGA packages but it does work.
Great….
Has that thing got enough i/o pins to layout a few hundred of them in an isometric grid? Imagine that with the right code running on it to simulate a neural network in a way that can be reconfigurable via command messages passed through the mesh along with the data flowing through it to be processed.
So a slower and bigger FPGA/PLC?
The only use case I can think of for this MCU is making very small software controlled SMPS boards with special features. Precharge for highly capacitive loads, programmable frequency control for max efficiency, remote sensing, control over I2C or whatever bus etc
I think wearables are probably a big market. I’ve seen lots of smart rings around lately.
Hardware implants, here we goooo!
Waiting for an arduino integration, then i’ll buy some
945 page datasheet, 15 page silicon errata – I dunno. Cute but simplicity is not there.
I just find the time required to learn and roll with these parts is too much. Other engineers stick to what MCU’s/IDE they already know, so they can hit the ground designing right away instead of the boss yelling “are you done yet?” while you are reading 100’s of pages of new data and pray you don’t run into some deal-breaker new bug in the part.
This is for the projects where what you want/know doesn’t work. And the bigger the datasheet the better usually, I don’t want to guess or rely on random knowledge from the Internet.