(this is part of an ongoing DorkbotPDX workshop series being sponsored by TempusDictum, Inc.)
A few weeks ago I bought the last of the Really Bare Bones Arduino rev A boards from Brian at Wulfden (http://wulfden.org/freeduino/freeduino.shtml) I now have enough boards for one more workshop and then we have to reevaluate the boards which are avaliable. Pictured below is a finished board from the first “Arduino Cult Induction Workshop”
In addition to letting me clean out his new old stock Brian threw in one of the “Rev B” boards so I could check it out. Unfortunately I don’t like it.
The new board is almost 3/4″ of an inch longer than the original. Most of the new space is dedicated to room for a power jack and a regulator. Things that I never use. The design is supposed to allow you to cut the power jack off as well as the regulator. Notice in the finished board above that their is space for a big old reset switch. When the original Arduino came out you had to reset the board to get it into the bootloader. However in the past year or so all the new boards have been using the dtr signal run through a capacitor to pull the reset line so the switch is wasted space. The original board made up for this space by adding ample ground and supply connections. The new board adds another 1/8″ and gets rid of these.
As I was grumbling about this Mark Gross suggested that I just roll my own.
So we are back to the drawing board. Above is my pen markup of the changes that I wanted to see done to the original Really Bare Bones Arduino and below is the draft of the rework to scale with the RBBB rev B.
Now comes the fun part (not) The cost of goods sold and a business case.