Adafruit Metro Mini 328 - 5V 16MHz

by Adafruit

METRO Mini is the culmination of years of playing with AVRs: a tiny, breadboard-friendly development board that is easy to use and is hacker friendly.

They sure love the ATmega328 at Adafruit, the processor has plenty of GPIO, Analog inputs, hardware UART SPI and I2C, timers and PWM galore - just enough for most simple projects. When you need to go small, you can use a Pro Trinket 3V or 5V, but if you want to have USB-to-Serial built in, reach for an Adafruit METRO Mini.

Metro Mini can be programmed with the Arduino IDE (select 'UNO' in the boards dropdown)

  • ATmega328 brains - This popular chip has 32KB of flash (1/2 K is reserved for the bootloader), 2KB of RAM, clocked at 16MHz
  • Power the METRO Mini with 6-16V polarity protected on the Vin pin, or plug the micro USB connector to any 5V USB source.
  • METRO has 20 GPIO pins, 6 of which are Analog in as well, and 2 of which are reserved for the USB-serial converter. There's also 6 PWMs available on 3 timers (1 x 16-bit, 2 x 8-bit). There's a hardware SPI port, hardware I2C port and hardware UART to USB.
  • GPIO Logic level is 5V but by cutting and soldering closed a jumper on the bottom, you can easily convert it to 3.3V logic
  • 5V onboard regulator with 150mA out, 3.3V 50mA available via FTDI chip
  • USB to Serial converter, there's a genuine FTDI hardware USB to Serial converter that can be used by any computer to listen/send data to the METRO, and can also be used to launch and update code via the bootloader
  • Four indicator LEDs, on the top of the PCB, for easy debugging. One green power LED, two RX/TX LEDs for the UART, and a red LED connected to pin PB5 / digital #13
  • Easy reprogramming, comes pre-loaded with the Optiboot bootloader
  • Beautiful styling by PaintYourDragon and Bruce Yan, in Adafruit Black with gold plated pads.

The Metro Mini comes as a fully assembled and tested board, with bootloader burned in and also a stick of 0.1" header. Some light soldering is required if you'd like to plug it into a breadboard, or you can solder wires or header directly to the breakout pads.

Detailed specifications:

  • ATmega328 microcontroller with Optiboot (UNO) Bootloader
  • USB Programming and debugging via the well-supported genuine FTDI FT231X
  • Input voltage (Vin): 6-16V (a 9VDC power supply is recommended)
  • 5V logic with 3.3V compatible inputs, can be converted to 3.3V logic operation
  • 20 Digital I/O Pins: 6 are also PWM outputs and 6 are also Analog Inputs
  • 32KB Flash Memory - 0.5K for bootloader, 31.5KB available after bootloading
  • 16MHz Clock Speed
  • Adafruit Black PCB with gold plate on pads
  • 18mm x 44mm x 4mm / 0.7" x 1.7" x 0.2"
  • Weight: 3g
  • Derivative of "Arduino UNO R3 Reference design" 
  • Open source hardware files on github!

17 customer reviews

2 years ago
Good quality product at a good price, a great brand. Ideal complement to my raspberry pi pico. Greetings from Spain.
by Fernando about Pimoroni Pico VGA Demo Base via REVIEWS.io
2 years ago
I am very satisfied with the product. It arrived on time, the box was perfectly intact and the UPS courier was very professional and accurate in tracking. The board is of excellent quality, I can say without any doubt that Pimoroni products are always of high quality. I also really liked the packaging, the card comes in a really pretty blister.
by Giuseppe about Pimoroni Pico VGA Demo Base via REVIEWS.io
3 years ago
Bought on sale and its a bargain for the price, saves tiem trying to wire in a VGA, SD Card and Audio connections to a Pico, also has the thinest VGA connection Ive ever seen, and has a handy reference on the back of the board to say whats wired into what ports on the Pico.
by Chris about Pimoroni Pico VGA Demo Base via REVIEWS.io
3 years ago
Wonderful Board! I'm loving the fact that both PWM and DAC audio are supported, and that absolutely every GPIO on the Pi PICO is used. Currently running RP2040-Doom as a first test and it works great!
by Bachmann about Pimoroni Pico VGA Demo Base via REVIEWS.io
3 years ago
Very well made easy to set up, looking forward to testing further as interested in emulation on old computers
by Anonymous about Pimoroni Pico VGA Demo Base via REVIEWS.io
4 years ago
If you're reading the excellent Pico documentation, then you'll have read the hardware design document - this board is an implementation of the reference board described in detail in that document. It's a great board with lots of potential to demonstrate just how powerful the Pi Pico / RP2040 is, and there is a lot of excellent documentation on the board in the hardware design document from the RPi foundation which makes experimenting with it both (fairly) straightforward and a lot of fun.
by DAVID about Pimoroni Pico VGA Demo Base via REVIEWS.io
4 years ago
Wow what an amazing device and very promising possibilities!!! very happy with this little Vga module!! thanks Pimoroni !! cheers from Montréal ,Canada and stay happy gang the sun is coming!!!
by Steeve about Pimoroni Pico VGA Demo Base via REVIEWS.io
4 years ago
This is an excellent microcomputer in itself. With PICO as CPU, VGA, Soundcard, Micro SD and USB it begs to become a semi retro platform (In the meantime, I use it as a sound card for the RPI400)... Pimoroni! Please make a case simmilar to Coupé Flotilla for this little board!
by Andrzej about Pimoroni Pico VGA Demo Base via REVIEWS.io
4 years ago
Great implementation of the Pico VGA demo board, it looks great and performs well too - colours over VGA are good and I was able to run the SD card in 4 pin mode at 75MHz.
by Mike about Pimoroni Pico VGA Demo Base via REVIEWS.io
4 years ago
Great add-on, it's actually more than a breakout board : it brings all the components to transform a Pico to many different devices like a mp3 player, a game console or even a fully fledged computer !
by Fabrice about Pimoroni Pico VGA Demo Base via REVIEWS.io
4 years ago
Excellent quality as always. I plugged it in to my monitor, ran one of the demos and it worked perfectly. One suggestion - add an I2C connector which shares GPIO 20/21 with the SD Card slot. They won't be able to work at the same time, but they can coexist.
by Laurence about Pimoroni Pico VGA Demo Base via REVIEWS.io

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