Arduino dev boards may be all the rage for software devs and hardware modders – but they are often considered overkill for smaller-scale projects.
Enter Digispark – the tiny, Arduino-enabled USB dev board – which has thus far managed to raise an impressive total of $72,912 on KickStarter.
“We were tired of leaving our valuable Arduino’s behind in projects, or worse, ripping apart old projects to build new ones! We also felt the Arduino was too big and powerful for many projects where we only needed a few pins, or an SPI or I2C bus. And so the Digispark was born,” explained project leader Erik Kettenburg.
“To us, the best things about the Arduino is the community, the easy of use, and the IDE – by making the Digispark an Arduino compatible development board all of those remain common. Plug it in, power your project with USB or external sources, program it with the Arduino IDE, and easily use existing Arduino code!”
Digispark boasts some pretty sweet specs, especially for a dev board the size of a quarter, which does make hand soldering prototype difficult. However, Kettenburg was quick to point out that it is the “perfect size” to use in even the smallest of projects – but not too small to comfortably handle.
Key specs include:
* Support for the Arduino IDE 1.0+ (OSX/Win/Linux)
* Power via USB or External Source – 5v or 7-35v (automatic selection)
* On-board 500ma 5V Regulator
* Built-in USB (and serial debugging)
* 6 I/O Pins
* 8k Flash Memory (about 6k after bootloader)
* I2C and SPI (vis USI)
* PWM on 3 pins (more possible with Software PWM)
* ADC on 4 pins
* Power LED and Test/Status LED (on Pin0)
As expected, Digispark is adamantly open source, with Kettenburg pledging to release release schematics, firmware and “anything else you might need to hack, change, or recreate the Digispark.”
Interested? A cool $28 will get you three Digisparks with free shipping anywhere in the USA.
