The engineers at BitsNBlobs Electronics have a goal of helping others to learn electronics at any skill level. Their approach involves a website that will act as knowledge base for Arduino compatible projects and creating their own projects boards, and the group is currently funding their first board Piksey on Kickstarter.
Piksey is billed as ‘the world’s smallest Arduino 328 core’ and was designed to give Arduino Uno functionality in a package that can fit inside a bottle cap. The board is 20 x 20 millimeters square but outfitted with 16 breadboard compatible pins. The ATmega328P processor has 2 kilobytes of SRAM, 32 kilobytes of Flash memory, 1 kilobyte EEPROM read only memory and runs through an 18 Volt wide range regulator. Two LEDs are included, one to indicate power and the other for user costumization, and a reset switch is also included on the board.
The campaign video shows several projects that have been built with Piksey: a battery operated gps tracker, temperature monitor with OLED display, LED strip using 6 RGB lights, a motion detector, pulse width modulation fade sketch, and as a volume controller. It’s definitely neat to see what can be done with a small board and more compact projects.
Kipsey joins a very crowded field of single board computers, trying to create their own boards that are very small but also powerful and performing at the Arduino level. I fully agree with the BitsNBlobs Electronics philosophy that the best way to learn electronics is to start working on different projects, and these relatively cheap boards will be a good entry point for people who want to start. It will be interesting over the next year to see how this project progresses and how much educational content or project displays are built into their website. Only 1,000 boards are available in this first run, and the campaign ends on August 8 with first production parts scheduled to ship in December 2018 and January 2019.