Pocket Arduino

Well, I have to admit that I’m little bit obsessed with Arduino clones. I always wanted to create my own pocket portable Arduino. 

I thought that Altiods tin would be perfect housing for such a project. I also had one ATmega328 laying around. There were few abilities I wanted my pocket Arduino to have. Since I wanted my Arduino to be pocket or let say portable there should be some sort of power source inside. I quickly chose 9V battery for that purpose, because arduino itself doesn’t have that big power consumption and there are still pins that I can use for other voltage input. Then I needed somehow to upload code to Arduino, so I needed some way to communicate between Arduino and PC. I chose one of that small USB to TTL converters. Keeping in mind that this Arduino has to be portable I’ve desoldered female USB type D connector that was there and replaced it with male USB connector. With this option I don’t need any USB cable, (maybe USB extender if you don’t have laptop) I can just plug the whole Altoids tin inside my PC. Another thing I wanted was small breadboard, because that’s the thing that makes Arduino portable. There were more things I wanted to have there, but even with these, it was really hard to close the tin after I've placed everything inside. But after all I’m really satisfied with the success. Arduino is fully operational, portable and still looks like mints case.