Meet Digispark, Arduino's little brother
The open-source Arduino micro-controller is a very useful piece of kit which has been implemented by hackers to power countless endeavors from Musical Umbrellas to Angry Birds Slingshot Controllers. For some projects however, the flexibility of the Arduino can be overkill and it's this issue which prompted Digispark to create a simpler, cheaper alternative - a tiny Arduino-compatible developmental circuit board that costs as little as US$12.
Portland native Erik Kettenburg was inspired to build a smaller and cheaper “Arduino-lite” after becoming frustrated with needing to harvest former projects to retrieve his Arduino board. Digispark aims to keep the price low so that it can be practical for hackers to own multiple units, leaving the diminutive open-source device in a previous project, while still able to begin another.
Digispark sports many of the benefits which have made the Arduino a popular choice with hackers worldwide and it can be used for a variety of purposes, drawing power either from USB or an external source. The device can be programmed with the Arduino IDE (or integrated development environment) and will even run existing Arduino code, giving Digispark the potential to be very flexible, in the right hands.
