Slowly but surely, the age of 8-bit micros being the first tool anyone picks up is coming to an end, and we’re seeing more and more ARM dev boards in nifty, breadboard-friendly packages. [Zapta] thought he would throw his hat into the ring with the ARM Pro Mini, a tiny little board based on the ARM M0 microcontroller.

The ARM chip on this board is the NXP LPC11 with 64 kB of Flash, 12 kB of RAM, and just enough pins to make the whole endeavor worthwhile. The board itself is extremely simple, with just enough SMD parts to be annoying to hand solder.

All the nifty bonuses of ARM boards are available on the ARM Pro Mini, including drag and drop firmware over the USB port, support for single stepping and debugging, and the IDE is a single install with NXP Eclipse/LPCXpresso. Mbed is also supported, so it’s possible to use this board with no software installs when using the online Mbed IDE.

[Zapta] has put everything you need to build this board up on his Github, and has even done a few simple ‘getting started’ tutorials, including a cool little example with a graphics library and a small OLED.