Nano Computing

Small Is Beautiful

At just $2.40 Nano 3 packs an Arduino into just 45 x 18mm!

I bought my first pair of Arduino Nano boards back in 2009, and I remember paying about £20 each for them.

As we all know, hardware has tumbled in price over the last few years, so I was pleasantly surprised to pay just £5.00 each for a pair that I bought this week, from UK ebay vendor Squirrel Labs. They would have been a fraction of this price had I bought them direct from the Chinese supplier.

The boards turned up within 2 days - which was great, because I desperately needed them for this weekends making activities.

The pcbs are produced by a familiar Chinese supplier "Baite Electronics"  - whom I have used in the past for their STM32F103 "Maple Mini" clone.  Despite being " a bit rough around the edges"  - where the pcb had been V-scored and left rough - easily cured with a rub on some fine wet and dry sandpaper, the boards were of otherwise high quality.

The reason for the price reduction, is that the clever Chinese have finally engineered their way out of being held to ransom by FTDI.  See this Hackaday Article

Nano 3 uses the CH340G USB-UART converter IC (right)

These Nano clones use the CH340G  USB to serial converter IC, which is claimed to cost as little as $0.20 in China.  The boards worked straight out of the packet - and my Windows 10 desktop had no difficulty locating and installing the driver for the CH340 VCP.

The CH340 means that it is now easy and very cheap to add USB connectivity to any microcontroller which does not already have it on-chip - or to add a second comms port to a microcontroller that has a spare UART or even bit-banged serial GPIO lines.

I found a datasheet for one of the CH340 devices via Olimex, but my part, the "G" variant, is a 16 pin SOIC - and the datasheet is here.  There is a useful application note showing the CH340G being used as an opto-isolated USB to UART interface - which I reproduce below:

This can be very useful - especially if you are working on mains-powered equipment - and need an "FTDI" cable output for programming or debug.

There likely to be many more applications for the CH340 forthcoming - now that it is no longer cost prohibitive like the FT232, and that Blogger Ian has produced EagleCAD libary symbol and footprint for it. An ebay search of CH340G will turn up several sources - for about £0.35 or $0.50 each.

FTDI  FT232  R.I.P.  The cheapest I could buy a FT232 in 1 off was £2.84 +VAT).

So at last we have a USB-UART bridge that doesn't cost a fortune - and being a 16-SOIC package, it's fairly easy to solder to the board by hand.  With this small, yet signficant device - we are well on the way to price eroding the cost of microcontroller hardware.

BTW - if you are a Mac User - you might want to read this blog for details on how to get the CH340 working and the source of the signed driver.  Thanks to Dave CJ  (@ceejay) for pointing that one out to me.

I had a quick look at the BAITE website - and was pleased to see a pack of 10, ATmega328P-PU Pro-Mini clone boards for just $15.  At that price you can use a pro-mini for all your latest projects - for a fraction of the price it costs to buy an ATmega328 in the West.  I also looked up their Nano 3 - again only $2.40.

Which brings me onto a minor rant about the extortionate costs of hardware produced in the West. An email earlier this week from Sparkfun Electronics caught my attention - advertising their latest "Red Stick" product.  This is essentially an Arduino Nano clone fitted with a boost regulator - worth about an additional dollar.  How on earth do Sparkfun expect people to pay $24.95 for this product?  Come on Nathan, buck your ideas, or expect to be trampled under a stampede of similar products from China - for under $5!   And whilst on the subject - please take note that Arduino are still trying to charge $20 for the original Nano!  I think that this is probably because they are no longer manufactured in volume in the west - and so have become very expensive.  I saw Protopic asking nearly £40  ($56) for one!

So the humble Arduino Nano has found a new life in the East, and seems to be thriving.  In addition to his cousin Pro-Mini, what other small microcontrollers are emerging from the East?

I covered the STM32F103 boards back last year,  and then there is the Teensy - also a good board.

Chinese IC firm, Giga Device have "copied and enhanced" the range of STM32F M3 Cortex microcontrollers and increased their clock speed to 120MHz. Some of these GD32F103 boards are now available on the market - so if you want a 120MHz board with 12bit ADCs that can be programmed with the Arduino IDE - then these may be of interest. Roger Clark of stm32duino explains in his blog.

ARMiGo Updated

Stretched Nano?  No it's ARMiGo 5 - Updated to include ESP8266 WiFi Port

Having used the Nano in a couple of small projects, I like the DIL format microcontroller dev boards - they are breadboard friendly, compact and easy to use.

Since I have recently updated my general purpose wireless board, WiNode, I like the ATmega1284P in it's 40 pin DIL package - again partly because of it's breadboard friendliness, and the fact that the power pins are arranged in the centre of the package - such that if you get the package in the wrong way around  - you don't fry the IC!

Back in March 2014, I designed a 40 pin DIL breakout board for the STM32F303 microcontroller called ARMiGo.

Shortly after that, I discovered that the Maple Mini, a very similar STM32F103 board  - also in a DIL format, was available very cheaply from China.  I addition, Roger Clark of stm32duino had been working on implementing "Arduino" on the STM32.

Now it's time to revisit ARMiGo, and to bring it up to date and in keeping with my generic small microcontroller footprint.

The 40 pin footprint breaks out 32 GPIO lines in four 8 bit ports, nominally called A, B, C and D.

This format ideally suits the small LQFP microcontrollers  - up to and including 48 pin packages.

As I have been working on a 50x50mm breakout board for the ATmega1284P - so I decided to kill 2 birds with one stone - and use that 50x50 board to act as a generic carrier for any of the smaller microcontrollers.

So the task in hand was to make the footprint of ARMiGo look exactly like the 40 pin DIL version of the ATmega1284.

Extra Features

ARMiG0 5 is fitted with a STM32F373CCT6  offers the following - over and above that of the ATmega1284 (ATmega1284 spec in brackets)

• 256Kbytes Flash memory  (128K)
• 32Kbytes SRAM  (16K)
• USB  (no USB)
• 8 x 12 bit ADC  (8 x 10bit ADC)
• 3 x 16 bit differential input ADC  (none)
• 72MHz clock  (20MHz)

These extra resources make it an ideal candidate for an upgraded microcontroller for the Open Inverter project. The 16 bit differential SD-ADC channels are ideal for making simultaneous 3 phase power measurements. 

Now comes the task of moulding the available peripheral features - so as to provide the best fit to the ATmega1284 footprint - and also my 50x50 board.

The 12 bit ADC channels can be allocated directly to the PA0 to PA7 pins.

The 16 bit SD-ADC inputs can be connected to the PC2 to PC7 pins 

The SPI port, I2C port, USART1 and USART3 -  all have direct equivalent pins on the ATmega1284 DIL footprint.

Crystal, Vcc, GND, AVCC, AREF - all these map directly

That just leaves a few GPIOs left to allocate to Port B and Port D.

The proposed layout is shown above.  I have included a 4 x 2 header allowing the ESP8266-01 WiFi module to be plugged straight in.