Developer Kevin Bates, creator of the Arduboy, has launched a funding campaign on Kickstarter Arduino Minithe last project that was done to create a very small Nintendo Game Boy clone.

The Arduboy Mini is not a new development in itself, as we repeated it in 2019 when a prototype was shown on the official YouTube channel compared to the original model.

As you can read in the Kickstarter campaign, the Arduboy Mini is “8-bit open source console with over 300 games (pre-installed) on a small circuit board. Learn to code and share your games online for free.” The basis is the Arduino motherboard, hence its name, and includes six buttons and a small OLED screen that supports a resolution of 128 × 64 pixels. The rest of its features are a 16MHz ATmega32u4 processor, 2.5KB of RAM and a USB Type-C port packed into a 1.6mm thin device.

Very small dimensions and its modest features make the Arduboy Mini they do not have a battery or a speaker, so these elements must be powered through the contacts that the console revealed, although for the first thing you can also use the USB Type-C port to connect to an external battery or directly to power via the corresponding adapter (a mobile charger should do). Another point to note is that it lacks a case compared to the Arduboy Fx, so care must be taken when putting the Arduboy Mini in your pocket.

The Arudboy Mini’s Kickstarter campaign was set to raise $10,000 and is already running at over $45,000, showing that the console packs a punch within its parameters. Kevin Bates has successfully and honestly run various campaigns, so he should be a creator you can trust.

It is clear that neither the Arduboy Mini nor the Arduboy Fx are products aimed at the general public, but rather at enthusiasts of this type of device and people who are interested in learning how to develop software (in this case games) starting with simple projects, because Arduboy consoles are not initially intended to emulate other platforms, but to run games that are made for them.