This Arduino board is bigger than your head, and it works

Arduino doesn’t have the cultural cachet of its fellow single-board player Raspberry Pi, but it’s arguably more popular for those who like to break out the soldering iron. Arduino boards are simple, efficient, and small, making them great controllers or enhancements for a variety of electronics projects. But what if the Arduino itself is the project? And what if that project is big? Like, really, stupidly big?

UncleStem on YouTube (spotted by The Register) asked something similar to that concept, creating an Arduino board that’s accurately scaled and 7 times larger than the real thing. It’s mostly a 3D printing showoff… but all those components actually function. Obviously, that massively oversized USB port and DC barrel port won’t work with standard parts, and things like the capacitors and resistors aren’t actually giant components. But the LEDs, reset button, and even female contact pins inside those big black pin headers actually work!

How? Well, there’s a genuine Arduino (a smaller Nano model, not the standard Uno) hiding between layers of plywood, which are pretending to be the printed circuit board via a series of decals. All the functional components are discreetly wired through three layers so they don’t show. That means that this massive thing actually works as a standard Arduino, albeit one without connections to male pins.

As a final touch, UncleStem created an oversized LED—a real, small LED inside a giant translucent housing with oversized copper power pins—complete with an oversized housing for a resistor. He shows off the basic blink command on a standard Arduino, then the same one on his 7x version. Success! Those who want to follow in his footsteps can use his 3D print files to follow along.