Few devices are more iconic in the maker community than the Arduino Uno board. To celebrate the Uno’s history and beloved status, we released the UNO Mini Limited Edition in late 2021. This little board is a tiny replica of the standard Uno, but with a special black and gold color scheme. While the UNO Mini LE is collectible, it is also a fully functional development board. Hari Wiguna took advantage of that fact to create this LED cube circuit sculpture shield for it.
The UNO Mini LE’s specs are almost identical to the standard Uno Rev3, since they share the same Microchip ATmega328P microcontroller (just in a different package). But the small size of the UNO Mini LE means that it isn’t compatible with normal Uno shields. Wiguna’s shield fits on the UNO Mini LE and provides a flashing circuit sculpture cube of LED goodness.
The cube is four LEDs tall, four LEDs wide, and four LEDs deep, resulting in a total of 64 LEDs. Wiguna arranged those as an array of four matrices to keep the I/O pin count down and to simplify indexing. The PCB shield was professionally fabricated, but the cube required hand-soldering to create the copper lattice structure that doubles as the circuit for the LEDs. To show off the cube’s LEDs, Wiguna coded a sketch that includes 3D animations.
When Katie Dumont of element14 Presents received her Arduino UNO Mini Limited Edition, she was concerned that it would end up like most of her other pieces of hardware — either stored somewhere safely in its box or on a shelf for display. But because she wanted it to avoid this fate, her other idea was to feature it prominently within an amusing wearable.
For her project, a series of LEDs would be the main output as their color and animation can be changed dynamically. In addition to the lights, the necklace was planned to include its own LiPo battery pack for maximum mobility, although it would not feature any user inputs so that space could be saved. Each of these components were carefully laid out in FreeCAD and had a case constructed around them, which exposes the side of the pendant so that the LEDs can emit a faint glow onto the shirt material below, whereas the UNO Mini is front and center.
The device’s code is based on the preexisting Adafruit NeoPixel example, as it contains the typical rainbow and solid color modes. Because the top pins of the Uno Mini are exposed, connecting one of three digital inputs pins to ground will make the board enter a specific color pattern, otherwise it shows a default rainbow one.
To see more about how Dumont built this fun pendant, be sure to watch her e14 Presents video!
As familiar as we all are with the UNO, there’s probably a lot you don’t know about the iconic Arduino microcontroller board. Put on your rose-tinted spectacles, and let’s wax poetic about the origins of this beloved maker board.
Rise of the Techno-Hippies
By 2009, the team that would become Arduino was gathering steam. A team that Make: Magazine once referred to as “designers, teachers, artists, and techno-hippies.”
I don’t think anyone on that team would object to such a definition.
Forged in the crucible of a classroom, the idea of an accessible, affordable electronics development platform was under serious investigation. It would eventually give birth to the Arduino UNO, but despite its name meaning “one,” this is far from Arduino’s first board. Moreover, its name was chosen to mark a point in Arduino’s story where the business itself came out of beta and into version 1.0.
“The UNO is an arrival point of a large number of small experimentations and incremental improvements,” says co-founder Massimo Banzi.
These experiments weren’t just a learning experience for electronics design. They were useability tests, and even marketplace research. Each little quirk, unexpectedly popular feature and, of course, mistake helped to define what makers wanted and needed.
This was a time when the maker movement was still unrepresented by a defining brand or killer product. But not for long.
Massimo and David with Arduino CEO, Fabio Violante
Driving Towards the Future
The journey to the UNO wasn’t short, but it did have a distinct destination. The notion of an enhanced user experience was very prominent, although the people who would become the founders of Arduino hadn’t necessarily articulated it even to themselves. Looking back, it’s easy to see that this guiding principle was there from the beginning.
“On the original Arduino serial board, look at the components,” says co-founder David Cuartielles, talking about the earliest of Arduino’s self-assembly boards, which were used almost exclusively in the classroom. “They’re sorted by value. I made sure that components of a similar type and value were together, to minimize mistakes during assembly. For example, there were two diodes. In terms of operation, they’re working in opposite directions to each other. But to reduce errors when populating the board by hand, I set the diodes facing in the same direction, and the PCB’s tracks take care of orientation. So it’s optimized for education, not for electronic operation!”
“Back in the day we used to use FTDI chips,” Massimo recalls. “A Scottish company, now in Singapore. Great chips, but you had to install drivers to get your computer to recognize devices when you plugged them in.”
“Which is when we realized there was this thing called CDC (communications device class) protocol, which was embedded into operating systems. It’s the reason you don’t need a driver for a USB serial port. We found that you could develop a firmware for some simple Atmel processors that worked just the same as FTDI chips, but would liberate us from needing a driver.”
This opened the door to reprogramming the firmware and making the boards do other things. Some people created MIDI firmware to send notes to a computer. Others made HID firmware so they could emulate computer peripherals. It was the herald of dual processor experimentation, which piqued the interest of both Arduino users and its designers.
Press On with the UNO
These proto-UNOs also required you to press a reset button before uploading new code. It was a pretty standard requirement for any prototyping platform at the time. Most designers had simply never questioned this apparent necessity. But when the Arduino team found themselves placing more and more emphasis on user experience, this small requirement was identified as an obstacle to useability.
It was at a workshop in Germany when Massimo figured out an alternative.
“It turned out that if you put a capacitor between the reset pin of the microcontroller and one of the serial port pins,” he explains, “it would reset the board automatically whenever you opened the port.” This small tweak became a vital and very popular aspect of the UNO’s useability.
But there were a lot of other factors that went into making the UNO so recognizable that it’s become indistinguishable from the overall Arduino brand.
The Power of One
Early Arduino boards required a more active participation when it came to powering them up.
They already offered flexibility in choosing your power source. But if you wanted to power the board from the USB or the external power jack, you had to move a jumper. Not a lot to ask, but as many of the design experiments proved, these seemingly insignificant requirements had a disproportionate effect on usability.
People would forget to set the jumper in the first place. Or have it in the wrong position when trying to power on, and frustrations ensued. So a small circuit was implemented that detected where the power was coming from, and switched to it automatically. Simple, but essential.
Tweaks to the power options didn’t stop there. On other boards there had been some experimentation with microUSB ports, not realizing how fragile they can be. So when it came to the UNO, the USB connector was carefully chosen for its reliability. “It’s like a Russian tank,” Massimo laughs. “It’s indestructible.”
Feeling Blue
“Going from the original design we had on a rectangular green board, to the shaped blue board that everyone recognizes now, took two days,” David recalls, musing on how Arduino could move so fast because of its focus on simplicity. “And in between we went to a party. Because the designs are very simple.”
“The original board, before it became the Arduino UNO, was a typical green PCB,” Massimo explains, lavishing mediocrity on the state of pre-Arduino prototyping platforms. “Not so exciting. The PCB manufacturer we were talking to went on and on about how he was making blue PCBs because they were apparently easier on the eye for production line workers. We thought, ‘Hey! Blue is better, because everyone else is using green!’”
You can see a pattern in the way Arduino was beginning to question the norms of its industry. Those shades of blue and teal have become synonymous with Arduino devices, and that didn’t happen by accident. At the time, PCBs were green. Maybe beige, if they were still bare fibreglass.
But no longer, once the UNO arrived.
Arduino didn’t just have its eye fixed on usability. It was also searching for an identity that makers would associate with enhanced experience and quality. It just so happened that the UNO was destined to become the vessel that gave that identity a tangible shape.
The beautiful blue board, with the first appearance of the brand new Arduino logo
Taking Shape
“I was teaching and I had to draw PCBs on a white board all the time,” recalls David. “And all boards were square or rectangular. So how do you tell people which is left and which is right? In order to avoid errors in plugging things in and building the boards, which originally were self-assembly, I thought it needed to be a non-symmetrical shape. Then the students could see that this is left and this is right. It wasn’t a creative decision, so much as a functional one for education purposes.”
Around that same time, the school where he was teaching in Ivrea was issuing everyone with business cards. They arrived on Massimo’s desk in a small plastic box. “So that seemed like a good starting place for sizing,” Massimo remembers, “as it seemed like a great idea if we could fit the UNO in a plastic box like the one my business cards came in.”
It was taking shape as a very recognizable product. And you want to put your name on products you’re proud of. Typically any branding on a PCB was added using the standard font that came with the Eagle PCB design software. Essentially vector lines, not graphics. This change was enacted by a former student of the Ivrea classroom, Giorgio Olivero. He was entrusted with the new Arduino identity.
“The strength of our current image depends entirely on the outstanding work Giorgio’s done,” David notes. “Giorgio understands not only graphic design, but the importance of designing the whole user experience. He understood interaction design really well. He understood the nature of the Arduino project intimately, and the needs of the end user.”
An UNO in its original packaging, designed by Giorgio Olivero. Photo courtesy of Francesco Balducci.
The UNO was the moment when quality came home in every respect. The boards were given an appealing new color, precision engineering, high quality manufacturing, and an emblem that made sure you knew you were holding an Arduino.
“The response was fantastic,” David continues, reflecting on the reception that the new Arduino and its flagship device received. “Nowadays it’s really common to do these kinds of things, but back then on the maker scene it was really unusual to put so much into making things look good, and putting a focus on the user experience.”
One Small Mistake
“When I was designing the board I made a mistake that we still have to live with,” admits Massimo. “I moved the connectors in the top right of the board half a step to the left, so the gap between the connectors is non-standard. It’s 1.27mm out. Which is fine on the connectors at the bottom, but that’s why you struggle to use a veroboard to develop shields, because the connectors aren’t quite aligned as they were meant to be.”
It’s a mistake that had a silver lining, though. That slight misalignment also (inadvertently, perhaps) gave us a key for attaching shields the right way around. So, just between you and me, let’s pretend it was deliberate and say no more about it.
Even the first batch of UNOs that came off the production line weren’t quite where Arduino wanted them to be, quality wise. The process for milling the PCBs into the iconic UNO shape wasn’t as reliable as it is now.
A small number of the boards had rough edges where they were snapped out of the sheet after cutting. Nothing that affected the operation of the board, but not so good when your focus is on achieving a distinctive level of quality.
“A friend and I spent the weekend at the PCB manufacturers,” Massimo remembers, semi-fondly, “sandpapering the edges of the first batch of UNO boards. What else could we do?”
Ten Thousand and UNO
Makers responded very positively to the ethos behind the UNO. And that enthusiasm was directly reflected in the number of Arduino boards sold.
“I remember an article in a magazine celebrating that Arduino had sold 10,000 boards,” Massimo recalls. “Arduino was here to stay, they said, because back then if anyone sold 10,000 boards you were boss!”
Arduino itself celebrated this milestone back in 2007, with a predecessor to the UNO called the Arduino Diecimila, meaning “ten thousand”. Interestingly enough, this was also the board that introduced automatic software resets when uploading a sketch, so you no longer had to press a reset button. Without the Diecimila, the UNO couldn’t have been born.
The Arduino Diecimila
Now Arduino’s selling in the region of 10,000 boards a week. As you can imagine, magazines and blogs have stopped writing about every maker device that hits the 10,000 milestone now. The UNO itself, in fact, has recently crossed the 10 million mark.
The Day of the UNO
It wasn’t just the Arduino UNO that was unveiled at the Maker Faire New York in 2010. It was the new Arduino. Colors, branding, logos and a refined focus on usability and recognizable quality across everything Arduino did, from the UNO to the website and the packaging.
“I was the only one not present at that event in New York,” David laughs. “I was in a hotel in my home town of Malmö, because I had to launch the new website. At the time we were running the whole Arduino server in a $5-per-month VPS, because we had no money. Whenever we announced a new product, the website was going down. So to try and avoid this happening while Massimo was up on stage announcing the Arduino UNO, I was waiting to flip the website to Giorgio’s fantastic new design.”
The UNO’s launch signaled a transition from DIY success story to the primary platform for makers, engineers and creators around the world.
“We didn’t create a computer that allowed people to continue to do their job but at a cheaper price,” David continues. “We created a computer that empowered people who had no idea about electronics to start using technology, and this represented a huge life change for a lot of people. When I hear people say they started with an Arduino UNO, and now they’ve become the IT teacher at their school, it’s just amazing. And there are hundreds of stories like this.”
“There are some products in history that just work,” Massimo concludes. “That simply do what people need. So they endure. They last for a long time.”
The UNO wasn’t Arduino’s first board, and it won’t be its last. There have been many varieties of microcontroller and maker boards before and after the UNO, but none have been as iconic. As we cross the epic milestone of 10 million UNOs sold and the launch of the UNO Mini Limited Edition, we decided it was time to take a look back at some of our favorite UNO projects from the last 10 years.
And we want to hear about yours, too. Join us over on social media to share your favorite UNO projects, whether you built them yourself or marveled at someone else’s electronic creation.
The Toothbrush Machine
The queen of terrible tech Simone Giertz casually blew the internet’s mind back in 2015 with her robotic skateboard helmet with an automated toothbrush mounted on the front.
Arduino GRANDE
Spend more than five minutes Googling “Arduino UNO” and you’re bound to find yourself looking at the Arduino GRANDE. A fully operational UNO that’s six time bigger than it should be.
Coffee Printer
If you’ve ever left a coffee ring on your notepad or table top, you’ll appreciate how effective it is at leaving a mark. This UNO project put that annoying side effect of coffee to artistic use.
Autonomous “Follow Me” Cooler
Why carry your own beer and sandwiches around like a sucker, when you can “simply” connect a robotic cooler to your smartphone’s Bluetooth, hook it up with GPS and let if follow you around.
Skeleton Arduino Uno
This Arduino UNO is its own project, which is so meta it’s impossible not to love it! It’s a PCB without the PCB, and takes “open” source more literally than any other maker board has ever achieved.
Gaming Microwave
Microwave’s used to be considered the fastest way to cook things. But in today’s CPA-addled world, even one-minute noodles take too long. Problem solved; game while you’re waiting.
Floppotron
This UNO project takes the concept of “everything is a drum” to new levels by turning devices like hard drives, floppy drives, scanners and more into a techno-orchestra.
pedalSHIELD UNO
This programmable guitar pedal built from an UNO lets you create all your own effects and digital sounds, with an ever-growing repository of pre-built effects from the Arduino music community.
Automated Dust Collection
Master maker and craftsman I Like to Make Stuff has created some incredible carpentry projects, and underneath it all is an Arduino UNO keeping his awesome workshop clean.
Useless Box
Useless machines are a wonderful maker project rabbit hole to fall down. This is a great example, and even though they’re useless, you can learn so much from building one. Which means it’s not actually useless, right?
Drumcube
Drumcube is a drummer in a box, so as long as you’ve got an Arduino UNO and a small box, you’ll always have someone down in the boiler room when you play at a gig.
Petoi Bittle
This highly maneuverable little palm-sized robot runs, jumps and plays to become your very own robotic pet. Some stunning design work, and it can even carry up to half a kilogram as it skips around!
The iconic Arduino board is back, in the shape of the UNO Mini Limited Edition. Pre-orders have just gone live, so don’t dawdle if you want to get your hands on this stunning piece of Arduino history.
10 Million Makers Can’t Be Wrong
The UNO Mini Limited Edition is here to celebrate a pretty epic milestone in Arduino’s history. The iconic board, which first launched back in 2010, has become synonymous with Arduino itself. It’s like the company and the board are inextricably linked in the minds of makers around the world. For many, Arduino is the UNO.
There was a feature in Make: Magazine once, which declared Arduino was here to stay because it had just crossed the 10,000 sales threshold. Back then (and it’s not even that long ago), the idea that you could sell 10,000 maker boards was pretty epic.
The UNO has now sold over 10 million units.
It’s impossible to guess how many projects that equates to. Just like us, many of you will have owned a lot of UNOs over the last decade, and some of those will have been used in multiple projects. Can you still remember your first UNO, or your first UNO project? Share them with us!
So we wanted something super cool to celebrate this new maker board milestone. And that something is the UNO Mini Limited Edition.
Meet the UNO Mini Limited Edition
First and foremost, this is an UNO like any other. It’s (almost) the same specs, with the same processor, pinouts and performance that made the UNO so popular. But there are a couple of cool tweaks we think you’ll love.
Probably one of the first things you noticed was that the USB port has been updated to USB-C. An update we’re confident you’ll appreciate, and not just because it helps with the reduced form factor. Most of us have an abundance of spare USB-C cables kicking around these days, so it’s decidedly more convenient.
And then there’s the form factor. The UNO Rev 3 is, more or less, the same size as its predecessors, dating back to the original design. As you expect, the UNO Mini Limited Edition is half the size of the original footprint, measuring 34.2mm x 26.7mm x 8mm.
Limited Edition, for Serious Collectors
It’s not just the beautiful new black and gold design that makes the board so desirable. This is a limited edition, with each board individually numbered.
All the features you’ve come to know and love are still there, so this is a fully functional UNO in every respect. But hardcore Arduino lovers will also appreciate its desirability and collectability. Everything about the UNO Mini Limited Edition screams quality, from the device to the assembly, the packaging to the printing. Who knows what an unopened UNO Mini Limited Edition (R@RE! Mint, still in box!) will be worth in the years to come.
Make sure you join us on social media (#UNOmini) to share your thoughts and first impressions when you get it in your hands, and we’d love to see your videos of this beautiful new board being unboxed when it lands on your doorstep.
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