Hello
I have a number of prototypes of various things nearing completion. At the moment they all share the Duemilanove board I have. When I finish these projects I'd like them to have their own Arduinos but buying multiple Duemilanove's seems like overkill. What do people use? Does anybody know of some bare PCBs with just the essentials on that are suitable for committing to a final build of a project?
Thanks
Jim
Well for build it yourself, just search the forum for standalone. Many vendors sell small standalone boards also, you just have to check out the many Arduino/clone vendors also listed/mentioned in this forum.
Lefty
One of the applications I imagined for my PICO1TR
http://wiblocks.luciani.org/PICO/PICO1TR-index.html
was a simple board with just the essentials -- regulator,
crystal, reset circuit (with protection diode), ADC filter
and a debug diode. All of the pins of the Atmega are
brought out using a long-pin socket.
I was also thinking of a version without the regulator
and power jack. I haven't done this version but it
is a trivial design to create.
(* jcl *)
www: http://www.wiblocks.com
twitter: http://twitter.com/wiblocks
blog: http://luciani.org
I am going to create a custom arduino board for our project. Only because of per unit cost, in real volumes. Otherwise I'd use a RBBB arduino from ModernDevice.com.
Its very small, and you can buy bareboards and populate it as you please.
This is what I made, a standalone arduino chip with everything it needs and other stuff for the project:
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1283234470
The board costs me over $30 with $20 to populate with parts including the LCD. So it's $50 but very neat and robust, no lose wires except for 9V battery connector.
It all depends on what your product is. If it's something that someone wants, wires inside a box will do. You don't need to make a second one, you don't really need to spend the time to make your PCB. If your production is for larger quantity to sell to multiple costumers, PCBs will be increasingly more efficient, cheaper and trouble free. Just my two cents. I've never done production but hopefully soon.
If I am going to design a PCB for a project, I just integrate the ATMega on that.