Using the Arduino Pro Mini & FTDI

Today we will work with the Arduino Pro Mini, a small yet powerful Arduino board. We will also build a simple battery-powered robot arm controller.

Article with code – https://dbot.ws/promini
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The Arduino Pro Mini is proof that good things do indeed come in small packages. It uses the ATMega328 processor chip, giving it all of the power of the Arduino Uno in a tiny package. It even has a couple of extra analog to digital converters and is available in both 3.3-volt and 5-volt models.

Although it has been discontinued from the official Arduino store it is an open source design (originally built by SparkFun) and is readily available.

One thing that the Pro Mini is lacking, however, is a USB port for programming and debugging.

To resolve this you will need to use an FTDI adapter, a small board that allows you to connect a USB port to your Arduino Pro Mini. It’s a simple board to use but be careful of the hookup, as some Pro Minis (and some FTDI boards as well) have their connections reversed.

I’ll show you how to hook up the FTDI board to both a 3.3-volt and 5-volt Pro Mini and how to program it using the Arduino IDE.

We will also build a battery-powered robot arm controller for the MeArm, it can be extended to work with any servo motor based robotic arm. While I will be the first to admit that the design lacks a lot of features it does a good job of illustrating how to work with the 3.3-volt Pro Mini.

Here are the contents of today’s video:

Pro Mini Intro – 2:35
Using the FTDI Adapter – 7:26
Programming the Pro Mini – 11:16
Robot Arm Controller – 18:48

Hopefully, the video and its associated article at https://dbot.ws/promini will inspire you to build your next project around an Arduino Pro Mini.

I also want to thank everyone who has subscribed to the YouTube channel, we are now over 80,000 strong! If you haven’t subscribed yet please do, I’d love to have you as a subscriber.

And if you would like to suggest new content for these videos and articles you can do so by going to the survey I have set up. You can vote on subjects that have already been suggested or add one of your own. The link is in every newsletter and also in the welcome email you’ll get when you first sign up, so if you haven’t joined the newsletter please do so at https://dbot.ws/dbnews.

Please note that going forward the newsletter survey is the ONLY method of suggesting new content, it’s become impossible for me to track the suggestions I get in the YouTube comments. Thanks for your understanding.

Now go and build something small and wonderful with the Arduino Pro Mini!

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