FTCBlock Arduino pro Mini Nano V3.0 ATmega328P 5V 16M Microcontroller kit Without USB Cable Compatible with Arduino Nano V3.0 (5pcs)

I bought ten of these and so far have used only one. I soldered the pins onto it and then soldered it to a small piece of breadboard along with a mini mp3 player module. After soldering all of my jumpers I wrote and uploaded a sketch to use the mp3 player and have had no problems with it at all. I can't testify to what happens if you overload the circuit amperage or voltage as I have done neither. My original intent was to use an UNO, but the small size of this nano along with the fact that it duplicates the functionality of the UNO made it my go-to choice, and at the same time made my device very much portable. One other thing...the three "P's" of micro buying came into play here: price, price, and price. A price I could afford. A price nobody else could match. And, unfortunately, a price no longer available. These jewels were going for right at $3 apiece when I bought them. The inflation of the past two years has made that a distant memory. It was a great price if you wanted to do some volume building of circuits for commercial products. Oh, well...!

5 Stars - Basic Arduino Nano clone works fine4 Stars – Tricky to use Atmel-ICE debugWireBeginners:Pros:- This board works fine as long as you set it up properly.- It pretty cheapCons:- No instructions (but read further for some help getting started)- Nothing except board and unsoldered pin headers are included- You need some soldering skills to use this for any projectHere is a small getting started helper:- Get a mini USB cable- Use the googles to find and follow the CH340 driver install instructions on SparkFun- Download/Install/Run the official Arduino IDE- Plug in the board to your computer with a mini USB cable- Observe that the Power LED is solid ON and the L LED is flashing 1 second ON then 1 second OFF- In the Arduino IDE, setup as follows: Tools->Board: “Arduino Nano” Tools->Processor: “ATMega238P (Old Bootloader)” Tools->Port (set to whatever the CH340 driver uses. Mine was COM3 for Windows and /dev/cu.usbserial-1410 on my Mac) Tools->Programmer: “Arduino and ISP”- Get the example sketch File->Examples->01. Basics->Blink- Find the lines “delay (1000)” and change the 1000 to 500. This will change the wait time between flashing from 1000 milliseconds (1 second) to 500 milliseconds (1/2 second)- Program the code changes into the board using Sketch->Upload- Observe that the L LED is now flashing faster 1/2 second ON then 1/2 second OFFTips:Do yourself a favor and turn on Verbose outputs for both Compiling and Uploading by checking those boxes in Preferences. Verbose outputs will give you a chance of understanding what goes wrong when compiling the source and when uploading a sketch. Without verbose on, if something goes wrong, you will have no idea what happened.Get a decent soldering iron setup (pencil style iron, no clean flux, a tip cleaner and some very thin solder)Get a prototyping board with some wiresSpend some time on AdaFruit and SparkFun to learn some new interfacing stuff like servos, displays, etc.Advanced Users:FYI, I had enough issues on my Mac Catalina OS trying to connect my Atmel JTAGICE mkII, that I gave up and bought a windows laptop and an Atmel-ICE. Suffice to say that MacOS in their infinite wisdom now takes control of any USB device and has permanently broken the ability to use the mkII to program an Arduino.If you want to do some serious debugging like a real developer, you need to get the Atmel In-Circuit Emulator (Atmel-ICE) and use debugWire debugging in AtmelStudio. I’ll let you use the googles to find out more about this fine toolset.I deducted a star from this Arduino Nano clone because using the Atmel-ICE debugWire is a bit destructive. I’ve attached a photo on what I did to get debugWire working. Essentially, there are 2 0603 smd capacitors on the RESET line that needs to be removed. Additionally, there is a 1K ohm pull-up on the RESET line that needs to be no stronger than 10K ohm. Unfortunately, the 1K pullup is in a 4x chip resistor network, so you can’t just unsolder the one pullup. I ended up using a hobby knife to cut the trace from the RESET line that goes to this chip resistor. FYI, I found that I did not need to add back the 10K ohm pullup on the RESET line, but your mileage may vary.

The media could not be loaded.  After seeing the bad reviews, I felt I had to defend the product and the seller. I purchased only 3 of these boards as of today...bought them in February. Finally sat down to solder one together today. I was having a lot of problems programming it, so I thought I had either messed up the soldering (My first time soldering a PCB board that I can recall.) or perhaps the boards were bad. Well with some persistence I found out both were good...the board and the soldering. The other two boards tested good as well. I tested by uploading the "Blink" program and altering the blinking speeds. If the video shows, you can also see a blinking LED I inserted into holes for pins "D13" and" 3V3". You can directly insert the LED into the pin holes on the brand new board to test, straight from the package, before any soldering. You can do this without the additional separate LED. Simply watch the LED labeled "L" and you will see the length of on or off, or both times change as you change the delay settings in the program.This will help you know you didn't get a bad board to begin with. Plug the mini-USB into the board, then the USB end into the computer, and then start the Arduino Program/App. Select Tools/Port/COM# . Next while in Tools, select Get Board Info and it will display something like this: "BN: Unknown board VID: 1A86 PID: 7523 SN: Upload any sketch to obtain it" Next thing is to be sure to select your Board type via Tools/Board/Arduino Nano from the drop-down list and to select the processor via Tools/Processor/ATmega328P (Old Bootloader). Open "Blink", Verify the programming, and Upload it to your new Nano. Change the delay times a few times, Verify and Upload again and you will see your Nano respond.I hope this will help others who may still have these boards and I hope it encourages others to complete a purchase in the future, as I will do, because the three boards I purchased have worked after I thought they were 'bad' because of my being very new to Arduinos and having read the many bad reviews. This was the result of my own persistence* and much internet research. *(Yes, I have a stubborn streak and don't take well to myself failing, a personal flaw some may say. But now and then it comes in handy.)Again, hope this helps many others.

I purchased a pack of five of these for a couple of projects. They didn't come with any instructions, but all you have to do is set the Arduino Editor to "Pro or Pro Mini" and make sure the "Flavour" is set to "ATmega 328p (5V, 16MHz)." These are logic boards, so if you want to drive anything more powerful than an LED, you'll need some transistors. Note also that these boards take a mini USB plug (not micro) like the one pictured, so you might need to order it if you don't already have one.

I bought a 10 pack of these chips. At first my computer wouldn't connect to the board like others have said but it turns out windows had an optional driver update that was causing the connectivity problem. I ran the update and have had zero issues since.