Finding Arduino Pro Mini footprint

[paulvdh]

I do not like “arduino” much, but I bought some arduino boards (The wide boards with crazy pinout) together with some TFT displays from Ali, because I was curious about those displays and assumed I could just stick such a display on the arduino board.

It did not fit!
Pin spacing between the left and right row of pins was 0.1" wider than on the arduino boards.
By bending the “arduino” connectors a bit outward, and the TFT pins a bit inward I was able to fit them together but is is not as it should be.

Motto:
Beware of library components. Triple check everything.
This is also why I maintain my own checked library components.

[dchisholm]

@jgalak

Be careful with Pro Minis, especially if you use SparkFun modules (or ones based on sparkfun). They aren’t an exact match to the reference standard, a few of the pins (the four that aren’t near the edge, iirc) aren’t the same.

From an old post at Arduino Blank Shield Available? :

@dchisholm

. . . the “Pro Mini” doesn’t seem to have standards for its mechanical interface, so you must lock in a particular vendor before you lay out a board. Some of this non-standardization is demonstrated at https://arduino-board.com/boards/arduino-pro-mini Notice that some vendors place various pins in different locations, and some of the pin groupings appear in a different order on various versions of the product. One thing that isn’t obvious in the photos on that web page: some of the pad locations are NOT on the 50-mil (1.27 mm) grid that seems to govern the other pin placements. (They’re about 10 mils (0.25 mm) off the grid.) To aggravate the problem, it’s difficult to find diagrams that actually define the pin locations for any of the variants - the best I found is at http://img.alibaba.com/img/pb/053/955/500/500955053_563.jpg

Click the first link in the above quote & look at the pictures! Even Sparkfun seems to have produced two variations of the Pro Mini!

@jgalak

. . . I know I recently found a KiCad library that had both standard and sparkfun Pro Mini footprints and symbols, but can’t recall where . . . .

Perhaps the attachments to Help with importing arduino pro mini . . . ??

Dale

[jgalak]

@dchisholm

From an old post at Arduino Blank Shield Available? :

@dchisholm

. . . the “Pro Mini” doesn’t seem to have standards for its mechanical interface, so you must lock in a particular vendor before you lay out a board. Some of this non-standardization is demonstrated at https://arduino-board.com/boards/arduino-pro-mini Notice that some vendors place various pins in different locations, and some of the pin groupings appear in a different order on various versions of the product. One thing that isn’t obvious in the photos on that web page: some of the pad locations are NOT on the 50-mil (1.27 mm) grid that seems to govern the other pin placements. (They’re about 10 mils (0.25 mm) off the grid.) To aggravate the problem, it’s difficult to find diagrams that actually define the pin locations for any of the variants - the best I found is at http://img.alibaba.com/img/pb/053/955/500/500955053_563.jpg

Click the first link in the above quote & look at the pictures! Even Sparkfun seems to have produced two variations of the Pro Mini!

I may well have gotten it backwards. The point is, be careful

@jgalak

. . . I know I recently found a KiCad library that had both standard and sparkfun Pro Mini footprints and symbols, but can’t recall where . . . .

Perhaps the attachments to Help with importing arduino pro mini . . . ??

That’s the one! Worked great for me.

[ppelleti]

@dchisholm

Even Sparkfun seems to have produced two variations of the Pro Mini!

To be fair, SparkFun’s newer version is strictly backwards-compatible with their older version. All they did was add two new analog pins in a place where there had been no pins before.