Arduino Boards with Small Footprints [mid 2015]

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Robot Parts!

5 min readSep 21, 2015

Because there are so many variants of Arduino available, this is a selection we’ve made to narrow down our choices. This also includes main points of consideration for each board.

But you might want to see Sparkfun’s comparison first…

Confused by the different types of Arduino’s? This video by Sparkfun may help you to put things into perspective.

Now back to the article…

Official Boards

Arduino Micro
Arduino Fio

Sparkfun Boards

SparkFun’s Pro Micro
SparkFun’s Microview

Boards by other companies

Microduino and mCookie
RFDuino

ADDITIONAL BOARDS AFTER THIS ARTICLE

Teensy 3.1
Adafruit Metro Mini
Sparkfun QDuino
Bluno Beetle by DFRobot

OFFICIAL BOARDS

ARDUINO FIO

ATmega 328p @ 8 MHz
28 mm x 65 mm
has a footprint for an XBee (wireless comm)
has a LiPo charging circuit
3.3 Volts operating voltage as opposed to 5 Volt boards featured in this list

SPARKFUN BOARDS

SPARKFUN PRO MICRO [5V]

aTmega32U4 @ 16 MHz
33 mm x 18 mm
no reset button

SPARKFUN MICROVIEW

ATmega 328p @ 16MHz
Built-in 64x48 OLED display
requires a separate usb programmer
actual size unavailable, but it’s almost as small as a finger tip!
SPI communication unsupported as these pins are not externally exposed
no reset button

OTHER BOARDS

MICRODUINO + mCOOKIE

original microduino is 26 mm x 28 mm, mCookie is much smaller
several interesting shields available
has variants with and without on board programmer
you’ll have to install a special modified variant of Arduino1.0x IDE for programming
depending on the board it can use Atmega168PA, 328p, 644PA, 1284P (which signifies the memory of its flash, and EEProm in KB) that runs @ 8 Mhz — 16 MHz (depending on variant)
relatively “NOT noob-friendly” documentation and support (compared with official/sparkfun boards)
no official mCookie spec sheets has been released yet (available only for preorder as of writing)

RFDUINO

“The RFD22301 compliance approved SMT module is placed onto a DIP board to create the RFD22102 RFduino DIP form factor”
23 mm x 29 mm
16 MHz, 3V operating voltage
needs a separate USB programmer shield, no reset button
with onboard BLE hardware and compatible ios apps for built-in control features
a few interesting shield are available
relatively “NOT noob-friendly” documentation and support (compared with official/sparkfun boards)

SIZE COMPARISON IMAGE

You might be wondering why we I chose not to include Sparkfun’s Arduino Mini, Adafruit’s Trinket, Arduino boards for e-textile, Littlebit arduino’s, Intel’s Edison, Digispark, among others.

While these boards are also great, I just selected boards which I believe has the best balance of size, power, price, versatility, features and support (i.e noob-friendly-ness).

As you might have noticed most of the core chips of these boards are Atmega328p, Atmega328 and Atmega32u4 which are very similar to each other.

Littlebits and Digisparks don’t have enough pins and power. The Edison is too expensive and advanced for the projects that I have in mind. I have no plans on making e-textile projects so all boards specially made for e-textile are out. The Trinket and Mini have special specifications that i’d rather not worry about (E.G the Trinket Pro has unnecessary [IMHO] broken-out FTDI pins, and unusable #2, #7 and no serial communication, Sparkfun’s Mini has requires an FTDI basic breakout to program (that’s not a shield unlike for the Rfduino, Microview, and Microduino))

The projects we have in mind requires a handful of analog and pwm output pins (a few with hardware interrupt capabilities) for analog sensors and for driving dc, stepper and servo motors. They also need I2C, SPI, and Serial communication ports to communicate with other boards.