The goal of this project was to construct arduino nanos with a significantly smaller size. The nanos were placed in a droppable payload and were deployed from a carrier drone. The open source deign for the arduino nano was used and modified.

In order to minimize space, small smd components were used, and the usb to uart interfacing chip was moved to a separate board (v1.8). The size was reduced even further by relying on an ISP to program the processor directly (v1.9). The ISP method was the production method as it had the side effect of giving extra program space due to not needing to flash the bootloader to the processors.

This project was for Northeastern University's AerospaceNU branch (Project NUAV).

This design worked well as it allowed for standard Arduino Nanos to be used for prototyping before assembling the JBigs. In its first iteration, these boards were used to drop a matrix of transponders that could be activated and transmit location data. The ideal use of such a system would be to aid in search and rescue. Future iterations aim to include multi-drone communication networking to perform more advanced tasks autonomously.