Pico85 SMD Arduino compatible (ATtiny85)

Hi guys, I am Giovanni Blu Mitolo the "CEO" of www.gioblu.com. This is an italian site that contains guides, tutorials, video and examples for Arduino users. It is also the website of our little industry producing robot components. After a good response from the web, we started to develop the smallest and cheapest arduino compatible board. This was the goal. Some months ago we start to sell a micro production of Pico85 DIP, that was an Arduino compatible board build kit (with ATtiny85 MCU):

Today Pico85 SMD is on the market and we will see what the community thinks about this.


To facilitate the work on it, we offer many examples on communications (i2c serial and ISP are succesfully tested and documented), timing and interfacing with other hardware / sensors.

ArduOpen (http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,71804.0.html) is our IDE that contains also the ATtiny85 port (we have 62 ports inside) and helps to program easily Pico85smd. The board contains a ATtiny85 MCU, a 78l05 voltage regulator, 2 caps, 1 resistor and 1 blue smd LED. Minimalism
The board's price is now 12.50 dollars but we hope to be able to reduce price with bigger future productions. Moreover, our currency is not the most convenient if you want to export something. Additionally, for now international orders will be managed with mail. We are working on a international online shop to avoid this difficulty. gioscarab[at]gmail.com

I like it!

I would like it even more if it could be attached to a USB cable and programmed like a normal Arduino with bootloader.

Maybe an external "helper" board could perform this function?

Come to think of it, it would be great to have such a board that could program any of the Atmel chips via Arduino IDE USB connection without a bootloader on the target chip.

"it would be great to have such a board that could program any of the Atmel chips via Arduino IDE USB connection without a bootloader on the target chip. "

That sounds like what an AVR ISP Programmer does:
http://www.mdfly.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5&products_id=415
Not sure when these will open again, but this part works great with '1284 chips.

Hi Pico85SMD can be programmed with an Arduino duemilanove UNO Mega uploading ArduinoISP sketch on it.
Wa have discovered the possibility to run ATtiny85 16Mhz without external clock reference, using only the internal high frequency PPL clock. Here an example with a servo