The announcement of the nano prompted me to contact paulb and take him up on his hardware offer, the guy at
http://moderndevice.com , and see how small I could make a guino with it. The
rbbb does go together in a snap, there are no extra components, and even some hints on the web page about how to trim it down further. I didn't have an led, but a Serial.println("Hello world!!") convinced me that it had gone together correctly. The rest was just figuring out where to put the pieces and route the wires so it would be as small as possible. I also made it more modular than is normal for me, since paulb sent some extra pin headers. It took some fancy wire stripping, but I can pop off the prototype board whenever I need to work on it without ungluing the rbb from the back of the lcd (just hotglue). There is a 4 pin connector on the lower left for plugging into the vehice. I didn't have any zeners handy and I didn't hookup the backlight yet, but there is plenty of room between the headers on the protoboard, might even be room for an elm chip in there
. so I don't know exactly what I will do with it from here, but it is your basic mpguino lcd and buttons interface ready and waiting.
The dimensions are 1.25 inches tall X 1 inch deep X 3.5 inches wide. It would be fairly easy to make it less deep with a custom board though. It would be nice if there was an LCD that didn't have the green boarder around it too , but the inexpensive ones all have it AFAIK.
P.S. Just FYI, Paulb is seriously considering making a custom board that would piggy back on the lcd and hold the zeners and processor, etc, possibly a kit with everything you need. It should make it noticably smaller in depth (if you leave off the headers) and a lot simpler to assemble.
