StupidArduinos

Stupid Arduino is the practice of designing elaborate and pointless implementations of the Arduino platform. I chose Arduino as the phrase on which I would be free-style improvising for a few reasons. First of all, it’s a popular and accessible platform — far fewer people would be excited about stupid implementations of, say, HyperCard. Secondly, the ingredients for an “Arduino” (in the generic sense) are few and well defined: Any microcontroller with accessible GPIO running the Arduino bootloader can be reasonably referred to as an Arduino. And finally, it’s a platform that comprises multiple disciplines: An Arduino can be “stupid” because of its controller, its electrical design, its mechanical design or even its firmware or bootloader design.

Stupid Arduino only has three rules:

1. The device must run a functional, Arduino-flavored bootloader
2. It has to execute the example “blink” sketch (with appropriate delays)
3. It must have some form of GPIO broken out from the controller

Beyond that, anything goes: fun clock speeds, clock sources, architectures, form factors, power management - it’s all fair game.