There are many Arduino Clones on the market. A clone behaves as the original in terms of programming, but usually have a different PC Board Design from the genuine product although the exact same pinouts are honoured.
The Robotdyn clones are some of the best clones available and their Nano's offers additional protection in terms of polyfuses that almost no other clones have. I had the frustrating experience to work with other clones that smokes for a sneeze. They use poor quality components and the first thing to go on them is a protection diode on the programming port. The Robotdyn clones does not suffer from these problems, are very robust and a pleasure to play with. If you loose one of them, you will probably know why. Yet, they are very affordable.
This version Nano V3 is constructed on the ATmega 328 microcontroller (16MHz) has a small size and can be used together with model boards for solderless wiring (breadboard). To reduce the size, components are mounted on both sides of the PCB.
I prefer to work with the Nano compared to the Uno for the following reasons:
- The Nano is much smaller.
- It fits directly on a breadboard and works well for prototyping.
- It can be much easier incorporated in your PC Board design as you can solder it onto your PC Board. With an Uno you need to build a shield.
- It has 2 extra Analogue Inputs that the Uno does not have.
- It cost less.
The board uses a CH340G comminucations chip as converter from UART-USB. This is a budget solution. With an operation frequency in 12Mhz, it yields stable results of data interchange. The original Arduino's comes with an FTDI chip for USB communications. I can honestly say there is absolutely zero difference in performance between the FTDI and CH340G. All you need if you work on a Window or Mac machine, is a driver for the CH340G chip, on Linux it works out of the box.
The Nano V3, can be powered via micro USB-port (up to 500mA). External power supply 6-12V unregulated to output VIN, or 5V external power source to a regulate output of 5V. The power supply is automatically selected with the maximum voltage value.
PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS:
- MicrocontrollerAtmel ATmega168 or ATmega328
- Operating Voltage (logic level)5 V
- Input Voltage (recommended)7-12 V
- Digital I/O Pins14 (of which 6 provide PWM output)
- Analog Input Pins8
- DC Current per I/O Pin40 mA
- Flash Memory 32 KB of which 2 KB used by bootloader
- SRAM 2 KB
- EEPROM 1 KB
- Clock Speed16 MHz
PACKAGE INCLUDES:
- 1x NANO-V3-ATmega328/CH340 (Pin headers Unsoldered as in picture)