Looking for barebone PCB

Why not grab a Pro Mini then? Ready made and dirt cheap!

septillion hear ya. Got a couple of those. I just like the barebone concept, building a very efficient arduino for my solar project at this point.

There's also the Solarbotics Arduweeny.

If you remove the voltage regulator and power LED from the Pro Mini, you have the exact equivalent of a "bare bones" Arduino, with very little effort.

I've made barebones arduino on "solderable breadboard" style protoboard:

This specific one was done with the protoboard I sell on Tindie - but I'm hardly the only vendor of protoboard (though mine is better than a lot of what passes for prototyping board - I do double-sided boards with plated through holes on real FR4)

DrAzzy:
I do double-sided boards with plated through holes on real FR4)

Agree - makes for MUCH happier nights soldering than those crappy single sided boards where the copper rings always fall off all the time, especially if you have to make a correction... well worth the 50% or even less extra cost (making the boards cheap rather than dirt cheap). Not sure of the stuff I have on hand is FR4, the plated-through holes are key.

Bringamosa:
septillion hear ya. Got a couple of those. I just like the barebone concept, building a very efficient arduino for my solar project at this point.

If you remove the LED and the voltage regulator, a Pro Micro is just as efficient als anything you can build. You save space because it has SMD parts, you essentially get two additional layers for free (it takes only the space of the pins on another board) and it has a standard footprint (meaning that you can publish other boards without forcing people to also get your wierd through-hole Arduino).

Also, I would consider getting into SMD parts. It is really easier than you would expect and it is so much nicer.

Thanks all for the responses. The Pro Micro might be an good idea for the future!

Part of this project is also the experience of building it on your own, getting it to run etc. I do have the parts here already so would also be a waste of resources to leave it laying around and not make use of them.

DaveEvans that little Solarbotics Ardweeny looks fun. Bit pricy but fun. i guess i'll be going with the "Bare Bones Arduino V2 by Kevin Rye" as suggested by cmiyk. Downloadable as a board file for Eagle so maybe a bit easier for me to start playing around with designing some stuff on my own in eagle.

Once again, thanks a lot for al te response love the community!!!

Pro Mini != Pro Micro! :wink:

But you, you could use them but it's probably still cheaper to get a Pro Mini and leave the other parts in the drawer :stuck_out_tongue:

But less fun for now :wink:

The ATmegaXX8 target boards from Evil Mad Scientist are cheap, and very DIY friendly.

Although it's in the relm of "Perf" board, the Perma-Proto board from Adafruit can also work well as a barebones development platform.

Thanks all for the recommendations. For now i ordered this one:

10 for $5 and $7 shipping

Based on https://moderndevice.com/product/rbbb-kit/, which MDC still sells in kit, bare board, and "other" forms...

Good luck beating the Pro Mini on weight. Mine comes in at 4.2 grams, with all headers soldered in - so without the headers it's more like 3 g. A DIP-28 chip weighs almost that much by itself.

Every gram saved on processor is a gram more for sensors!

Wvmarle wrong topic? Weight does not matter at all in this project..

Ah... possibly, very similar one around about doing the same thing to a drone.

A nice thing about the MDC board (and Ardweeny) vs the Oshpark board, IMHO, is the FTDI header.

DaveEvans I get your idea too. I'll probably be programming the chip on the uno and them move it over to this board once all the debugging is done and it's ready to go out in the wild.

this is what i got today:

Went ahead and put some components on it already.