The Bare-Bones Board

The Bare-Bones Board was engineered to be a low-cost, breadboard-friendly Arduino-compatible especially useful for education. The USB communications chip has been removed to a cable which you only need purchase once. This has several advantages.

• It saves the cost of repeatedly paying for the communications chip.

• It makes the board 1/3 smaller in both dimensions than the Arduino® NG board.

• Designed with all through-hole parts for easy assembly by beginners.

• Using the cable makes it simple to embed “Arduino-compatibility” unto other boards, see the Servo project for an example.

The board was specifically designed to work with a FTDI TTL-232R USB-to-TTL serial cable, available below. The FTDI cable is also a handy way to debug lots of other microcontroller serial connections and will work anywhere you need a solid USB to TTL serial connection.

A low-cost (<$5.00) serial adapter is also available for those wishing to use an RS232 port. See the Connect page.

BBB Features:

Despite the Bare-Bones name, the BBB is a full featured Arduino-compatible that includes the vast majority of the functionality of the Arduino Diecimila. The Rev C and later even includes some analog noise-reduction features not found on other official Arduino boards. Breadboard-friendly options on the BBB are also not found on other official Arduino boards.

• Auto-reset and “Diecimila” bootloader for “one-click” uploads and faster times to get to the sketch. Software chip resets.

• Designed with male header pins on bottom to insert directly into solderless breadboards, saving a lot of wiring and fuss.

• Analog inputs have adjacent +5V and Ground buses to make interfacing sensors easy, using a three pin female header or servo cable.

• Flexible power options USB/External, onboard voltage regulator that can be used with either TO92 or TO220 voltage regulators.

• Convenient pins to power, (or draw power from) breadboard power buses, a shunt allows easy switching between options.

Revision D now shipping

The photos and instructions on the website are currently for the Rev C version of the board. Photos will be posted soon for the Rev. D version, which added only one capacitor and one header pin (reset) to the board to implement the “one-click” upload scheme now used on the Diecimila.

In Rev. C, an inductor and capacitor were added across the AVCC pin. This is recommended in the Atmega datasheet but not included in most other Arduino implementations. Some hole sizes were changed in the name of easier assembly, and the analog pins were moved over to accommodate readily available commercial connectors.

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