John Park retrospective: Arduino GRANDE @arduino

Arduino GRANDE

The Arduino GRANDE is one of my favorite projects I’ve made, not in small part due to the joy it seems to bring. When I demo my oversized microcontroller for people, they often break into a wide grin and shake/nod their heads, as if to say “OK, that’s ridiculous and awesome!” That was the reaction of my friend and Arduino.cc co-founder Massimo Banzi, when I showed it to him at Bay Area Maker Faire 2012. (Note: we both miss my moustache.)

Massimo JP grande

I built the GRANDE to be fully functional — at its heart is an actual Arduino UNO rev 3 routed to all of the GRANDE’s pins, ports, LEDs, and reset button — and big enough to be able to teach people how an Arduino works while pointing at human scale parts. The real ones are just so danged tiny. I’ve done a few talks about the making of the Arduino GRANDE, and recently posted an Instructable about it so you may build your own. I’d truly love to see someone make a GRANDE compatible shield.

grandeWire

Now, as far as Adafruit goes, I’ve got my eye on embiggening one of those lovely Feather boards…


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2 Comments

  1. I’ll bet the Grande can handle some serious current! 😉

    Can you provide the dimensions? I’d like to design an enclosure for it.

  2. Ha, yes it can, Alan! An enclosure would be terrific, what sort of materials are you thinking? The "pcb" is 384.3mm x 298.9mm
    Here are the CAD files: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:24225/#files

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