Scientist Shrinks Arduino To Size Of An AA Battery (techcrunch.com) 47
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.
The perfect spy-device (Score:5, Interesting)
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. :-)
Not without some easier IO.. (Score:3)
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!
Re: (Score:3)
I think the point of the RFM69 hardware is to use less power (and also get more range!). Wifi might be "standard" but not necessarily the right tool for the job. It's not that hard to have another little "gateway" arduino-like with same kind of radio -- listening, powered by and communicating over USB to a "real computer."
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TLDR: No. Just NO.
Intelligent Vibrators? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Intelligent Vibrators? (Score:5, Funny)
With the size of the batteries a decent vibrator takes, you can fit in a full water cooled i7.
Re: Intelligent Vibrators? (Score:3)
Re: Intelligent Vibrators? (Score:2)
An arduino is boring without IoT. Are those wifi antennas or are you just happy to see me?
Re: (Score:2)
Batteries? The best sex toys are 110V [wikipedia.org]
Incidentally this is the first result when I type magic wand into Google.
Re: (Score:1)
The only decently powered vibrators don't use batteries but have a cord to the wall outlet. Not that I would know anything about that...
Re: Intelligent Vibrators? (Score:2)
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these. . . (Score:2)
Backwards? (Score:1)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
It is not connected backwards it is "labeled" as if it were a battery in series with the other batteries.
Im a Scientist Mom! (Score:2)
Re:Im a Scientist Mom! (Not an Engineer) (Score:3, Insightful)
Really none too impressive. Off-the-shelf devices include this
https://tinycircuits.com/colle... [tinycircuits.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Im a Scientist Mom! (Score:3)
Don't know why scientists always get credit.
It's simply 'cause they always get the hot chicks.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't know why scientists always get credit.
It's simply 'cause they always get the hot chicks.
Or is it the other way around?
Re: (Score:2)
Don't know why chicks always get credit.
It's simply 'cause they always get the hot scientists.
Or is it the other way around?
Hmm...no...don't think so.
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Back off, man. I'm a scientist. [youtube.com]
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It may not be that impressive, but at least he isn't aiming the shrink ray at his kids this time.
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Not impressive at all though. First it's an arduino, dumbed down for EE people who don't like to program and CS people who don't like to solder. It's essentially just an introductory system for learning with really good marketing. Many professional systems designed for people make professional products are smaller. Now make it run from a coin cell while being smaller than the coin cell itself while having a radio talking IPv6.
Re: (Score:2)
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!
Many of the "scientists" that are referenced by slashdot posters are merely social studies coasters, and much of the "science" consists of starting with a hypothesis and cherry-picking results for support. This is actually an improvement - at least they don't pretend it is science.
Old Mag Lite "Hack" (Score:1)
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.
Eagles and Gerbers (Score:3)
My platform is an 8-pin DIP (Score:2)
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 m
Re: (Score:2)
The main limitation of my setup is it needs a 3.3V supply
does it also have 3.3v IO? I find that I want 5V a lot more often
Re: (Score:2)
They are 5V tolerant, so you'll want to level shift the outputs up to where they need to be. I rarely use 5V components in my own projects, but I may be unusual in that I tend to use modern highly integrated modules, accelerometers, lcd modules, GSM cell modules, SDR(lms6002d), etc.
I would also recommend the ESP8266 as a general microcontroller as well, but it's not 5V tolerant, so quite a bit less compatible with off the shelf stuff hobbyists use.
I sometimes run into modules that are 1.2V for their I/O (li
Did he remember... (Score:2)
Did he remember to give it a retarded connector configuration to make it incompatible with Veroboard and anything regular engineers would design?
Metric? (Score:1)
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"?
Java???? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Didn't you hear, C/C++ are really just clones of Java. /s
The sentence is poorly worded but I think they are trying to say that the IDE is written in java (which it is).
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In fact, if they had honestly meant to be talking about what language the IDE had been written in, then they would not have called it a java "clone" at all,
Honey, I shrunk the electronics (Score:2)
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 disco
Scientist or Engineer? (Score:2)