A shout-out to Steve, Github user Sd4Projects, for designing and building several neat circuit board designs!

Steve says:

This is my build of a MiniMega2560 board. It uses the Mega2560 cpu with a CP2104 USB interface. The reason that I made this board was I wanted a more ports and memory for Arduino projects and I wanted a 3.3 volt Mega2560 that could be used with a breadboard.

The bare board can be found at OSH Park. https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/cue1DDEi with project name MiniMega2560v10.1.

He provides all the info on how to build and program the bootloaders for the design.

Steve didn’t stop at a new board – he has designed three add-on boards, one we especially like:

• MiniMega2560 NetCard – a network card for 3.3 volt version of the MiniMega2560 Arduino that uses Arduino Ethernet2 code. The board uses the W5500 network chip.
• MiniMega2560 NetPoE – a PoE card for Network Card for 3.3 volt MiniMega2560
• MiniMega2560 Adapter – an adapter board to support Adafruit Feather boards using MiniMega2560 cpu 3.3 volt version

Steve says about the Feather board:

This board adds support for many of the www.adafruit.com feather boards so they can run on the 3.3 volt version of the MiniMega2560 running Arduino. Since the MiniMega2560 using the mega2560 cpu, you will need to change the software pin defines for some feather boards to use them with the MiniMega2560.

Thanks Steve for your hard work and recognizing that a new design does not require reinventing dozens of add-on boards. The Adafruit FeatherWing ecosystem is designed to a single tiny board standard to work with Adafruit Feather, Photon Particle, and other boards to provide extended capabilities. The specifications for Feather are Open Source (Software and Hardware), so there are no issues to adding FeatherWing support to your project.

Thanks to Adafruit user sembazuru for finding this great project and posting in the forums.

Have you built your own microcontroller system? Let us know in the comments!