Stupid Arduino is the practice of designing elaborate and pointless implementations of the Arduino platform. I chose Arduino as the phrase on which I would be free-style improvising for a few reasons. First of all, it’s a popular and accessible platform — far fewer people would be excited about stupid implementations of, say, HyperCard. Secondly, the ingredients for an “Arduino” (in the generic sense) are few and well defined: Any microcontroller with accessible GPIO running the Arduino bootloader can be reasonably referred to as an Arduino. And finally, it’s a platform that comprises multiple disciplines: An Arduino can be “stupid” because of its controller, its electrical design, its mechanical design or even its firmware or bootloader design.
Stupid Arduino only has three rules:
- The device must run a functional, Arduino-flavored bootloader
- It has to execute the example “blink” sketch (with appropriate delays)
- It must have some form of GPIO broken out from the controller
Beyond that, anything goes: fun clock speeds, clock sources, architectures, form factors, power management - it’s all fair game.