I recently soldered up a Boarduino from Adafruit Industries. Boarduino is simply an Arduino clone with a smaller form factor, designed to plug directly into a breadboard rather than giving you the female headers of the original. I thought I’d post a few photos of the process.

I really like the idea of the Boarduino, because I found I was doing almost all of my prototyping on a breadboard, and it seemed like I was always trying to figure out new and different ways to anchor the big Arduino down.

To get the size down, Boarduino makes a couple of design changes, most notably the elimination of the female headers on the top of the board, in exchange for the male headers on the bottom, which then plug directly into a breadboard, rather than having a rat’s nest of jumper wires running from the Arduino to the board.

Boarduino also eliminates the USB port and the associated USB chip, much like the Arduino Mini. Instead, to program the board you need either a USB-TTL cable, which plugs into the six-pin header at the end of the board, or an FTDI breakout board like the MiniUSB.

Both the Arduino Mini and Boarduino are designed to plug into a breadboard. The main difference between the two is that the Mini uses a permanently-soldered surface-mount chip, whereas the Boarduino uses a 28-pin socket and DIP chip, so if you blow one, you just spend six bucks and pop in a new one, rather than buying a whole new Mini. In addition, the Arduino Mini lacks Boarduino’s 9V barrel jack and voltage regulator, so you have to design that circuit yourself. Plus, the Boarduino is simply cooler because you get to build it yourself!

The first step is getting your work area all set up, as shown in the image above. (The WES51 really ties the room together does it not?)

Check out the great solder joints done by the WES51. I used a small, stiff watercolor paintbrush and isopropyl alcohol to clean the rosin flux off the board and joints after soldering, leaving a nice, clean-looking board.

Power supply finished and tested, in this case with the USB-TTL cable.

Note that the Boarduino uses a 16MHz ceramic oscillator rather than a crystal. This is slightly less accurate, but only on a nanosecond scale, and not relevant for most projects.

Ready to install the 28-pin socket.

Socket and headers soldered in.

Behold the AVR ATmega168 microcontroller.

Inserting the ATmega168.

Boarduino completed, powered up and ready to go.

Can’t get enough of those close-up solder pix? Check out the rest of my Boarduino photos on Flickr.