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That looks cool! It's a more professional design (4 layer PCB with power and ground planes), with the side-effect that an amateur won't have the tools to tinker with it. Pray that you don't fry your Atmega, surface-mounted components are more difficult to change!
However, there is no link on availability and price of this board. Any extra info?

Posted by: Collin Cunningham on May 15, 2008 at 4:48 AM

yups - via the arduino blog:

$44.95 USD from gravitech
http://store.gravitech.us/arduino-nano1.html

It's a BASIC Stamp. Well, it's certainly the same price as one.

IMO, this takes away from the whole arduino experience. No more tinkering and playing around with the board itself :(

We don't want to stop you from tinkering: that's a major part of the Arduino philosophy (see, for example, the booklet: http://www.tinker.it/en/uploads/v3_arduino_small.pdf). Massimo likes tinkering so much, he named his company after it. We've got a board designed for etching by hand, so you can do everything yourself: http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardSerialSingleSided3

Sometimes, though, you want a compact, ready-to-go package, and the Nano is for those cases. We think there's a value in offering both kinds of designs.

And yes, this is the same price as a Basic Stamp, but it's far more powerful: there's integrated USB communication, a faster CPU, etc.

@BigD145: It's not only the same price range as a Basic Stamp, but the upper 24 pins appear to be pin compatible. Stamp pins 1-4 are S_out (TX), S_in (RX), Atn (reset), Gnd, while 21-24 also match here. The extra 6 pins on this board won't fit in the socket of a normal Stamp-based board, but this would fit nicely in any socket that supports the BS2p40 (Stamp with 32 I/O).

The ATMega168 is certainly more powerful. The bootloader makes this almost as easy to program as the stamp, just not in Basic.

This would be a good step up for someone already invested in Parallax hardware. Parallax makes nice boards, and great beginner/intermediate chips. This may be an alternate upgrade path instead of one of the Basic Stamp clones.

Anyone know if there is work being done to port the Arduino software to the AtTiny?

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