brickAVR: the Proto-brick

Sometimes, prototyping systems need to be robust, full-featured, and powerful. Other times, nostalgia and simplicity are much more appealing. Rather than buying a pre-made prototyping board, one of our readers grabbed some parts lying around, including an Atmega8, a SMD 16Mhz oscillator, and a 6 pin ISP header, and performed some circuit origami free-form soldering (thanks [Gilberti]!). After it was assembled, he realized that it fit in a hollowed out 2×6 Lego brick rather easily. After adding female headers to the pins, as well as a label and some hot glue to seal it up, he was left with a fully functional, and most likely very durable centerpiece to a project. We would love to see this worked into a Lego Mindstorm robot, just for the sake of fitting in.