Overview

The Boarduino

The Boarduino is an Ardunio compatible board designed to plug into solderless breadboards.

Like the Sippino, the Boarduino needs an FTDI cable in order to be programmed. As my primary interest here is in Robotics, the USB serial port is superfluous to the project once the chip is programmed, however the voltage regulator that comes on this version is quite useful. Further, even though the USB Serial chip isn’t present, the actual serial port in the ATmega chip is available on the pins in the breadboard so you can still use it to talk to serial peripherals.

The inclusion of the voltage regulator means that you can take a battery box with 6 “cells” (6 x AA batteries) plug it into this board, plug this board into a breadboard, and have the foundation for a nice little robot starter kit. A couple of modified servos and some wheels and you’re good to go.

Specs and Features

As mentioned the two most compelling features of this flavor of the Arduino are that it plugs into a breadboard for easy prototyping, and has an on board voltage regulator. It also has a reset switch and access to the in-circuit programming pins. Programming is done using a “standard” FTDI serial cable. There is also a USB Version which has the USB port (provided 5V and Serial) which I have not used.