WTherm, a DIY smart thermostat that aims to provide ease of use and save energy at the same time. This is the story behind my high school thesis research. Read the final report here, or continue to learn more.
Above is the smallest Arduino-compatible board yet, measuring only 21x14mm. Sporting the ATmega328P, it has the same processing power as the Arduino Uno. There’s also an on-board voltage regulator and serial header for programming.
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For some Arduino projects, you don’t actually need that many IO pins. That’s exactly the case when I tried to build a simple RGB throwie that would cycle through colours. I was looking for a cheaper alternative to the Arduino UNO’s ATmega328P when I stumbled across this post by MIT’s High-Low Tech lab. They developed a library for programming the 8-pins ATtiny45/85 from the Arduino IDE. It’s a very smart solution to use permanently in some low pin-usage projects, but you still need to hook up individual wires from your programmer to the ATtiny to be able to program it. That’s when I came up with the idea of the BareDuino Micro.
Revision 3
When I began building robots I almost exclusively put together kits. Then I discovered the Arduino. The Arduino is a really popular electronics platform. Since then, I’ve made a LOT of projects that use the Arduino that I would like to make permanent. The problem is that it’s really expensive because an Arduino Uno costs about $30. Because the Arduino is open-source I thought: “Couldn’t I make a very cheap clone?”
