![]() It’s interesting to read how the Nano has been used in so many ways and has been adopted and modified to suit very different goals. (and on top of that, the Nano Clone voltage regulation has always been pretty “questionable.” There isn’t enough heat-sinking to get anywhere near the current that people expect, and there have been reports of incorrect regulator chips (7805 vs 1117 pinout, for example) installed that “no one noticed, until…” because they usually ran off of USB power anyway. And a 5V phone “battery pack” And even unregulated batteries have a pretty flat discharge curve, compared to “long ago.” While in 2004 the “wall wart” you picked up was likely to be unregulated, these days, you’re MORE likely to be able to find a regulated 5V “phone charger” or something. (and powering off of USB is not great from a regulation PoV, either.)īut that’s irrelevant, since I think the point was that voltage regulation has moved into power-supplies themselves. There’s LOTS of things you can do running directly off of a couple batteries. Analog can use the internal reference instead of Vdd (if they need an absolute rather than ratiometric measurement), and digital levels are based on Vdd are specifically relatively insensitive to smallish variations, and can vary from 1.8V to 5.5V for many modern chips. There are many options for regulators, including in a custom design just buying an atmega chip (rather than full arduino) for youself and adding a regulator for your whole custom board of “arduino+other stuff and periphrals” rather than a regulator within the arduino, but all designs need a regulator somewhere (unless you are willing to limit yourself to being only ever powered by something like a USB port/plug socket adaptor/powerbank. ![]() Either way analog measurements become unreliable over time and, if the drop is large enough and the levels were close to the cut-off point to start with, then some digital signals such as interacting with a 3.3V device also fail as the batetry level changes. If you tried that then as the battery level reduced over time all voltages on the board would (asuming everything you connect to is also powered from the same battery), or (if you connect to something powered from elsewhere) then the arduino’s levels will change while the other thing stays constant. There are a number of other spec and firmware improvements suggested in the writeup, as well as comparison between the Arduino Nano, Arduino Every, and Chinese clones. Rather than using the bootloader, ICSP (in-circuit serial programming) and DebugWire are possible alternatives that connect the ICSP pins to the CH551 development board or programming via the reset pin. Thus, programs using the COM port on the computer must release the port, including the serial monitor. The Arduino Nano uses a bootloader for handling programming the MCU, which requires the USB to serial bridge to be disconnected from anything that could interfere with the programming. While this may be controversial, there are sufficient battery power sources for this design to work (4 cells of AA or AAA NiMh batteries or a mobile phone charger). A better solution than both of these would be to simply not have a voltage regulator. Rather than featuring the typical voltage regulator used by Arduino boards (used to allow the board to be powered by a voltage source greater than 5V), a switching regulator allows for less energy loss but a higher component cost. While the newer MCU is not backwards compatible like its predecessor, it has additional UART, GPIO, counters, and other features that allow users to take advantage of new libraries and peripherals. Since the ATmega328PB was released, it has proven to be a better and cheaper MCU for manufacturing than the ATmega328P, the current MCU used by the Arduino Nano and clones. Naturally this increases costs, simply designing a two-layer PCB with components on top lowers the price of manufacturing. The PCB manufacturing for the Arduino Nano currently places components on both sides of the board, requiring two operations for solder paste, pick-and-place, and reflow. takes a look at lower-cost clones of the Nano made in China to highlight a few interesting key differences that make the clones – cheaper but still compatible with legacy systems – more attractive. While Arduino may or may not be interested in incorporating these changes into a redesign of the development board, there is certainly room for a new manufacturer to step in and improve some features. For one maker in particular, there were enough complaints to merit a redesign of the entire board. ![]() While we certainly do love the Arduino Nano for its low-cost and versatility in projects, it’s unarguable that every tools has its gripes.
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