Nano DIP: the smallest complete Arduino board 33 x 10mm

At a certain point, if you're going for "smallest", it's a bit of a cheat not to include Z-height, especially if you're relying on a vertical micro-USB connector in your design.

45x18=810 vs 33x10=330, great. But If you're adding another 5mm z-height for a connector, the volume is now kind of significant.

Just think of the stack-up at this point: Motherboard + female socket (1.6mm + 5mm?) + daughterboard (1.6mm) + pins (5mm?) + vertical USB (5mm?). You're looking at something that's +/-18mm tall. Given that this whole design is basically just a way of attaching a 1mm tall IC to a design, that starts to feel a bit extreme if you care about size.

If you really care about a tiny board, and don't need the DIP compatibility (or removability), I feel like a castellated design that can be soldered down is more useful. Designs like the Piksey Atto (20x13 = 260, but also something like 5mm tall)

For me, the killer feature of not having the microcontroller soldered down is that you can flash something on a dev PC, and then insert it into the device.

But in that case, I like something like the tinyduino, which eschews .1 headers and uses a B2B connector. More of a pain to deal with, but you get the benefit of tiny size + low z-height + removable: https://tinycircuits.com/products/tinyduino-processor-board

Regardless, more options are always better. But it's also useful to really think about what your requirements really are.

Nice, but not that impressive when compared to similar boards:

https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/Seeeduino-XIAO/

20x17.5mm, ARM® Cortex®-M0+ 32bit 48MHz microcontroller(SAMD21G18) with 256KB Flash,32KB SRAM.

https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/xiao_esp32s3_getting_started/

21x17.5mm, Xtensa LX7 dual-core, 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, On-chip 8M PSRAM & 8MB Flash.

OP, are there any parts on the bottom? The side picture has the headers hiding the bottom. Going by the schematic it looks like U3 is on the bottom.

The reason I was wondering is that without the headers it would be easy to solder it to another pcb like a module.

Very cool though, I hope it's a big hit.

It's really cool, but MicroUSB is a terrible connector.

Other than that(And the fact that I only very rarely build anything without WiFi), it looks awesome.

Most applications can just use the larger board, but for the ones that can't, this would sure beat a custom PCB just for a one off.

I love it. I've got multiple 'Radio Music/Chord Organ' Eurorack modules, which use a Teensy 3.2 to generate audio such as playing files from an SD card, or generating tones to be an oscillator. This (now-obsolete) Teensy has an onboard 12-bit DAC, which is used for the audio.

I worked out how to pump up the sample rate to 300k and up, drastically reducing the aliasing for the simple tone generation. Works great: it's what expensive professional synths like the Novation Summit do.

I don't know how many of these will be made and out there before it too goes away, but as somebody who's spent a lot of time playing with perfboard and CMOS chips and soldering music synthesizers and processors together, but who is not up to the task of doing that within an SMD context, Nano DIP is an astonishing hybrid of those two worlds. .1 headers gets you into a world where all sorts of things can be made from parts. I've even got a bunch of DIP ATTinys, the much more primitive ones used in the Bastl Kastle, for the same reason, but while those would also fit into that world, this is far more capable and run at high sample rate the 8-bit output is more impressive than you'd think: aliasing turns into an odd sort of harmonic distortion at very high sample rate.

I hope this catches on, and I'm struggling not to just run off and buy a bunch of them even without a plan (when I haven't even used the Kastle-style ATTinys). As long as there are people with workshops full of vintage through-hole components and breadboards and perfboard etc. I hope there are projects like this that bridge the gap between that and the world of Arduino.

Imagine one of these with even better ADCs and a DAC that's natively 16 bit but able to clock up to silly rates when used on simple waveform generation (never mind that pulse and square waves need only be 1 bit, and sawtooth waves use only 1 bit for their characteristic part). You'd have a DIP 'chip' that would work like a really expensive analog Eurorack oscillator, available for hacking prototypes together. Heck, this is probably already there. I hope synth makers jump on this project. It seems hard to predict which Arduino-world things continue to be available (crude ATTinys) and which do not (Teensy 3.2 with the 12-bit DAC).

Cool as hell. It's kind of a shame the pins live in different places, so you can't put the board into the DIP slot on an actual uno. Not that there'd be a serious reason to do that.

I don't get this, you use a dev board for ease of access. If you need a tiny footprint, just place the chip on your board O_o

Impressive, but I can't foresee any project where I would pick this over the vastly more powerful PJRC Teensy 4.0 [1]. It is only slightly larger and only costs $3.85 more.

[1] https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy40.html

I like that the usb connector is vertical. I always found it more challenging than necessary to plug and unplug the cable when using a breadboard as its hard to get a grip on the cable and forces me to put the board on the breadboard's edges.