A Nano With An Otter’s Bite

The would-be microcontroller experimenter is now faced with a bewildering array of choices when it comes to a tiny development board for their projects. Everything from descendants and clones of the original Arduino through to full-fat Linux powerhouses such as the Raspberry Pi Zero and similar boards can be had, and often for a reasonable price.

A new entrant has now joined the fray, the OtterPill is an STM32F072-based board with an Arduino-Nano-like pinout, and it comes from the bench of [Jan Henrik]. With so many competitors you might ask yourself what it can offer, and it would be a valid point given that a Nano clone can be had for relative pennies. Aside from the Nano shield compatibility and extra power of the ARM Cortex M0 then, it’s an open source development board with USB-PD included from its USB-C socket, and with some elite BoM wizardry he’s managed to get the cost of its components to below three dollars. A USB-PD example firmware is available and a blank firmware is on its way. For now the board exists only in prototype form, but he’s putting together a production run if you would like one too. We saw an early development of it at eth0 back in the autumn, and given the progress since then we’re sure that we won’t have to wait for long.

Regular readers will recognise [Jan Henrik]’s work, because otter-themed boards have made their way to these pages before. Our most recent ones were the USB-C replacement board bringing USB-PD to the TS-100 soldering iron, and  a nifty little USB board for addressable LEDs.

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