The Nano That Wanted to Be an Uno

1,160

2025-01-27 | By PTSolns

License: Attribution Adapters Microcontrollers Solder / Desoldering

This is a tale of a Nano that wanted to be an Uno...

The Nano that wanted to be an Uno

Motivation

This project is just for fun, really. It is easy and affordable to just get an Uno R3. However, going through this project will help with soldering skills as well as test your patience when trying to neatly route all these jumper wires. It's fun nonetheless! At the end of the project, you'll get a Nano that has the footprint of an Uno. It works with all the standard Uno Shields (shown later), and we've even added a reset button, although not at the same location.

Before Moving On...

This "Uno Costume" that the Nano is wearing is only possible for these reasons:

1) The PTSolns Nano Flip does not have the 2x3 Pin Male headers for the ICSP interface. If using a Nano that has these, stackability with other shields becomes difficult. Alternatively, one can unsolder these headers to make the required space.

2) The PTSolns Proto-Shield has just enough room available to fit all of the 15-pin rows. In fact, we had to "cheat" a bit to make it work, by using the SOIC breakout onboard the Proto-Shield. If using a different prototyping shield, the user should check that indeed there is sufficient space to fit the Nano.

3) The Nano Flip is soldered directly onto the Proto-Shield. Typically, we would not recommend this and instead use a pair of matching female headers so as to be able to reuse the microcontroller development board after this project is complete. However, doing so in this case would void stackability with shields. The user should be aware that this project sacrifices a Nano Flip!

Fritzing Schematics

This section is the crux of the project. The user should carefully reproduce the connections one by one. We tried to group the wires by color to help the user with this process. The blue wires are the digital pins, and the orange wires are the analog. Black and red are ground and power. The others are the remainder. Note there are several wires that run underneath the Nano Flip. The following are two Fritzing images with and without the Nano Flip, to show the hidden wires better. Note that Fritzing seems to have a requirement that wires are always over parts. And so, in the first image, the underneath wires are still shown to be running over top the Nano Flip (and even going into the PCB!). This is of course not correct, and the user will quickly see which is which once assembling.

Also note that when you are actually assembling and routing the wires, you will find "short-cuts" and set up the wires slightly differently from how they are shown in the Fritzing schematics. Even when we assembled ours, we ended up running some wires in ways that made it a bit easier (take a close look at the cover image and compare it to the Fritzing schematics... can you spot some differences?).

Fritzing schematics

Application

Ah, at last, you've made it and you are ready to test the happy Nano with its new Uno costume! Below are two inspirational images to show various applications. There are an endless number of Uno shields out there and most will work with this NanUno (??). ... Of course, you could use a second Proto-Shield and make your own shield and stack it on the NanUno that you just made, well, with another Proto-Shield :)

NanUno with NRF-Shield NanUno with Interface-Shield

Resources

The Fritzing models are available on our documentation subdomain: docs.PTSolns.com. Find datasheets, 3D models, Fritzing models, and more on the docs subdomain.

Datasheets & supporting material on PTSolns Documentation Repository: https://docs.ptsolns.com