Description

We sure love the ATmega328 here at Adafruit and we use them a lot for our own projects. The processor has plenty of GPIO Analog inputs hardware UART SPI and I2C timers and PWM galore - just enough for most simple projects. When we need to go small we use a Pro Trinket 3V or 5V but if you want to have USB-to-Serial built in we reach for an Adafruit METRO Mini.

METRO Mini is the culmination of years of playing with AVRs: we wanted to make a tiny breadboard-friendly development board that is easy to use and is hacker friendly. Metro Mini can be programmed with the Arduino IDE (select 'UNO' in the boards dropdown)

• ATmega328 brains - This popular chip has 32KB of flash (1/2 K is reserved for the bootloader) 2KB of RAM clocked at 16MHz
• Power the METRO Mini with 6-16V polarity protected on the Vin pin or plug the micro USB connector to any 5V USB source.
• METRO has 20 GPIO pins 6 of which are Analog in as well and 2 of which are reserved for the USB-serial converter. There's also 6 PWMs available on 3 timers (1 x 16-bit 2 x 8-bit). There's a hardware SPI port hardware I2C port and hardware UART to USB.
• GPIO Logic level is 5V but by cutting and soldering closed a jumper on the bottom you can easily convert it to 3.3V logic
• 5V onboard regulator with 150mA out 3.3V 50mA available via FTDI chip
• USB to Serial converter there's a genuine FTDI hardware USB to Serial converter that can be used by any computer to listen/send data to the METRO and can also be used to launch and update code via the bootloader
• Four indicator LEDs on the top of the PCB for easy debugging. One green power LED two RX/TX LEDs for the UART and a red LED connected to pin PB5 / digital #13
• Easy reprogramming comes pre-loaded with the Optiboot bootloader
• Beautiful styling by PaintYourDragon and Bruce Yan in Adafruit Black with gold plated pads.

The Metro Mini comes as a fully assembled and tested board with bootloader burned in and also a stick of 0.1" header. Some light soldering is required if you'd like to plug it into a breadboard or you can solder wires or header directly to the breakout pads. Once headers are installed they can be fitted into 0.6" wide sockets

Mac & Windows People! Don't forget to grab & install the FTDI VCP drivers from FTDI to make the COM/Serial port show up right! The default drivers may not support this FTDI chip!