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The Mini SAM D51 is part of a family of LEGO® minifigure sized development boards, one designed with the Atmel® | SAM D21E ARM® Cortex®-M0+ microcontroller and this one with the Atmel® | SAM D51G ARM® Cortex®-M4 microcontroller.
The project goals were to design and build a LEGO® minifigure sized development board incorporating as many features as possible within the size constraint. Along with the physical board design and layout, software and firmware was developed to allow programming using the Arduino IDE or Circuitpython. Included on the boards are a simple LED, a WS2812B or APA102 Red/Green/Blue LED, a builtin button, a reset button, the SWD Cortex programming/debugging port, and access to as many pins as possible. In some board revisions, a 32.768kHz crystal is included to support the builtin real-time clock available in the SAM D21E chip. Following as much of the reference designs for the microcontrollers as possible, both boards include analog reference decoupling/filtering capacitors, analog to digital ferrite beads, debounce circuitry for the reset and user buttons, etc.
The printed circuit board is as close to the size of a LEGO® minifigure as could be made, which makes it 0.95 inches wide and 1.55 inches tall. All design files are available on Github and support open-source hardware (OSH) initiative.
The board features the beautiful 1980’s spaceman outline, the iconic and LED back-lit rocket swooshing around a planet, as well as a reference to Emmet’s badge from The LEGO® Movie. As much of the original LEGO minifigure shape has been replicated and kept in the PCB design, but some limitations to manufacturing required some compromises.
Latest Design
Latest Design Details on this page.
This is project is very much actively being worked and updated. Unless specifically posted to the wiki, assume some of the latest files have not been fully tested.