Tag: smol

Nionics Atto – Arduino on a dime #smol

Nionics Atto – Arduino on a dime #smolUnfortunately — and you can see it here on the completely dry five USB pins — the soldering on the USB connector of the Nionics Atto I just got wasn’t good. When I soldered on the weentsy pitch headers the heat of the iron melted the one joint that was holding the connector on. It’s impossible to repair without thermal rework equipment.

I really wish that Nionics had pre-soldered those 1.27 mm / 1⁄2₀″ headers as it was a nice board. Since it breaks out only a few of the ATmega32U4‘s pins, instead of a single LED it has an RGB LED for an indicator. Otherwise, program it like an Arduino Leonardo.

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taking the whole proto-plate thing a bit far …

Yes, it’s a very tiny microcontroller board and breadboard doohickey. The board’s a Trinket M0 running CircuitPython 2.0. The base is laser-cut birch ply. Definitely #smol  at less than 75 × 55 mm …

Here’s the SVG for laser cutting:
To build it, you’ll need:

  • 3 mm birch ply (at least 75 mm × 55 mm)
  • Adafruit Trinket M0
  • Tiny breadboard: either a tiny or a Mini one. The board markings match either.
  • M2.5 screws and standoffs
  • 4× stick-on feet
  • 2× 1×5 female header — I cut down a 1×12 female header.

If I were to redesign this, I’d:

  1. make the breadboard outline a score line rather than an etched area. Scoring is much quicker than etching.
  2. Mark pin definitions on the plate. They’re a bit hard to read on the Trinket M0.

Obligatory blinky code for running a 16 LED NeoPixel Ring and the LED in the middle of the Trinket:

creature so smol

This little one was napping in the sun on the bike path.