Bits N Blobs' Piksey Atto Is an Arduino Leonardo Compatible in an Ultra-Compact Form Factor

Glasgow-based Bits N Blobs has launched its Piksey Atto, an ultra-compact castellated follow-up to its popular breadboard-compatible Piksey microcontroller development board.

Bits N Blobs launched the original Piksey two years ago as the world's smallest breadboard-compatible development board to feature the ATmega328 core. Now, it's back with an even smaller variant, this time taking inspiration from and promising full code compatibility with the Arduino Leonardo rather than the Arduino Uno.

"We recently started creating DIY projects on our YouTube channel and we ran into a similar issue, time and again. Most of the sensors and modules that we commonly use are already very small in size but the Arduino compatible boards used to drive them were not so much," the company explains. "There are some development boards that are small in size but they all seem to have one issue or the other - either they do not have enough I/O pins, are not powerful enough or lack native USB support which limits the overall capabilities.

"We designed Piksey Atto to take care of all these issues while also making it cheap enough to leave in projects. The board uses the ATmega32U4 microcontroller which is the same chip used in the Arduino Leonardo and Arduino Micro. This means that it is compatible with all existing sketches and works out of the box without having to install any board support packages. The Atto is smaller than a £1 coin and has everything you need to use it in your projects, including native USB support which allows you to use it to interact with your computer and much more!"

Being based on the ATmega32U4 gives the Piksey Atto a 16MHz processing core, 32kB of flash storage, 2.5kB of static RAM (SRAM), and 1kB of EEPROM. The design includes 11 digital input/output pins, four analog inputs, and four pulse-width modulation (PWM) channels, plus UART, SPI, and I2C buses, all operating at a 5V logic level.

Bits N Blobs has opened a Tindie waitlist for the board, priced at $9.99; its schematic, KiCad, and Eagle footprint files, meanwhile, are available on the BnBe Club GitHub repository under an unspecified licence. Additional information is available on the Bits N Blobs website.