MICROCONTROLLERS IN AMATEUR RADIO
The Arduino Uno® was one of the first popular microcontrollers to find its way into ham radio projects. The Uno had a relatively large footprint, so Atmel created the Nano, which was electrically similar to the Uno, but with a much smaller footprint. Photo A shows the two boards and their approximate relative sizes.
Each has 22 digital pins, of which 8 can also be used as 10-bit analog pins, 32K of flash memory, 2K of SRAM memory, and both were clocked at 16 MHz. The Uno had a large following at the outset and one reason was because it supported “plug-in” boards that could be inserted into the header pins you see on its edge in Photo A. The variety of the plug-in boards made it easy to enhance the microcontroller’s functionality by simply creating an “Arduino sandwich” with the plug-ins. However, the Uno’s popularity faded a bit with the appearance of the Nano, mainly because the Nano was about the size of your first thumb joint, but had the same performance and resource depth.
As the Arduino Integrated Programming Environment (IDE) gained in popularity, more and more projects, or sketches, using these microcontrollers appeared. A quick internet projects search turned up over 1.2 million hits for the Uno and more than 650,000 for the Nano. Other manufacturers saw As the performance capabilities of these microcontrollers grew, so did their employment in a little under a bazillion new uses.
