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Scientist Shrinks Arduino To Size Of An AA Battery (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Johan Kanflo has managed to make the already small Tiny328 Arduino clone into an even smaller computing platform about the size of a single AA battery. Not only will it fit in a typical AA battery holder, but it will actually draw power from the batteries beside it as it's wired in "backwards" (with the + and - poles reversed). The Arduino platform consists of open-source hardware, open-source software, and microcontroller-based kits, making it easy to (re)program the processors, and develop software for hardware applications using a java-clone and an easy-to-learn IDE. For those interested in the AAduino, Johan has made his creation available online on Github with instructions and schematics to build your own.
Just put one in any other the target appliances and listen to everything. (until the batteries die and the device gets thrown out with them obviously. :-)
I can only imagine...
That doesn't sound right - surely you would want to keep polarity the same, the arduino becomes a voltage sink instead of source but the polarity doesn't change.
Cool, but not that impressive. My arduino is the size of an ATMega328, with the Arduino bootloader installed on it. There's nothing extraordinary being done here. You take a ATMega328, and solder it into a PCB with the smallest components you can find and you get to be called a "Scientist"? Score!
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Really none too impressive. Off-the-shelf devices include this
https://tinycircuits.com/colle...
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
So, it makes connecting power marginally 'easier' if you happen to have a suitable 3 cell holder.
And makes IO significantly more difficult?
IO is generally the whole point of microcontrollers - he has included a nonstandard Wireless interface, and a couple of temperature
sensors, so it appears to have perhaps one purpose, but is kind of overkill for that (an esp8266 would be far easier).
Progress!
From TFA: "Elegant, cool and not something I’ve seen done before."
This was a common way to convert an old incandescent mini "Mag Lite" to an LED torch. The idea was to replace the bulb (obviously) but to also replace one of the AA batteries with a driver board that would generate a high frequency signal to drive the LED as hard as possible. This was back in the day (15 years ago) when LEDS were still very new and the white ones weren't anywhere near as good as the modern CREE units.
If anyone is interested the Eagle and Gerber files are downloadable from links on the bottom of the article page.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
LPC810 is a Cortex-M0+ on an 8-pin DIP. It can be programmed with a simple TTL serial adapter.
The main limitation of my setup is it needs a 3.3V supply, but I can solder an MCP1700 and decoupling capacitors off the pins easily enough.
But the limited number of I/Os makes it very difficult to interface with more than a few peripherals. But that limitation tends to force projects to be simple inventions limited to a single task, rather than becoming sprawling swiss army knife projects. (LPC1114 is a DIP with more pins, but it is substantially larger)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Heard u like computer controlled batteries so we put battery controlled computers inside the computer controlled battery
Did he remember to give it a retarded connector configuration to make it incompatible with Veroboard and anything regular engineers would design?
I know metric is hard for Americans, but come on.
An AA battery is a 14500, that's 14mm diameter, 50.0mm long.
The Tiny328 is 22.9 x 36.3
How is that "size of an aa battery"?
The Tiny328 is 22.9 x 36.3 but the AAduino has similar form factor to AA battery. Two different platforms.
I thought that the arduino was typically programmed in a language more like c, or c++.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If size is critical, consider the LighBlue Bean Arduino compatible. It's even a bit shorter and is powered by a CR2032. The whole package with a CR2032 is about 1/6 the size of the three AA battery set pictured. I've used it for a few projects, works well. https://punchthrough.com/bean/guides/getting-started/intro/
Did he use new exciting Technology!
Or did he ask his Board house how small can to make this?
Surely this is an engineering accomplishment, not a scientific one.
So the label should be "engineer", not "scientist".
Imagine an alternate track where our electronics had been developed on a tiny scale, but there was this burning human desire to increase the scale over time so we could walk beside and through the individual components. If anyone made anything smaller people would just shrug and say, "What's the point of that?" There would be electron theme parks where you purchase units of charge to propel you through the rides. The thought of a clock strapped to the wrist would seem uncomfortable or disgusting... to discover the Time rational people make a pilgrimage to a Clock. Also imagine that in place of countless tiny mass-produced things, there was but one of each type of thing in the world, and folks would geographically converge to perfect it.
What if football, baseball, basketball and all participation sports are evolved from games devised by the ancients as a means for human participants to engage in simple algorithmic operations to compute the solution of some larger problem... with resulting regional and global metrics of the tournaments to be fed into some other apparatus (which has been lost) that compiles the partial results and alerts when the problem has been solved? What if the apparatus has not been lost, but we simply gaze upon it, having forgotten its function?
What if the Universe itself is the machine? No 42 jokes please.
There is evidence that an ancient civilization attempted to up-scale their electronics, perhaps with the help of aliens only Ljuba Stojanovic can now communicate with.
https://vimeo.com/163010009
http://www.cracktwo.com/2011/0...
Of course this sentiment exists and is happening in Minecraft with Medieval and Modern virtual technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/tethercell-magically-turns-aa-batteries-into-bluetooth-devices/
So what? It doesn't need a scientist to produce the next media hyped crappy application of the overhyped avr-breakout-board-with-a-shitty-ide-and-broken-but- soooo-easy-libraries called arduino (which is, by the way, programmed using avr-gcc, it's only hidden from sight and hipply called a "sketch", because idiots obviously can't be challenged with include directives and a main() entry point, nor can they be trusted to learn binary operators to manipulate bits in registers).
If you want to learn next to nothing about microcontrollers and have a blinky led in no time or want to create the millionth iteration of the "arduino plant watering system" (call it waterduino, plantduino, look-ma-no-hands-duino or whatever you like, just include the silly "duino" at the end) then go for it.
Can't polish a turd.
Gives a whole new meaning to "clusterfuck". . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
I know: "why not both?"