What I came up with is the Lira. It is, as you will see, little more than a breakout board for the ATmega328, but it provides all the bare necessities like voltage regulation, basic power conditioning and an FTDI programming interface. It’s the smallest, simplest, cheapest design I could come up with that still uses through-hole components for ease of construction.
Certainly, your Boarduino has more features, better power conditioning and all of that. But then the Lira is significantly smaller at 2.15×0.85″ (vs. 3.0×0.8″, per the Boarduino page). So perhaps it will find an audience among those in search of the smallest, most bare-bones microcontroller they can build themselves.
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
