WYPH Mini Nano V3.0 Module ATmega328P 5V 16MHz CH340G Chip Microcontroller Development Board USB Cable for Arduino (Pre-soldered Nano 3pcs)

I've waited for years for somebody to come out with "twinkling" LEDs for Christmas. Not the set were some small % of them go on and off, but the whole strand. So, got myself a strand of WS2811 LEDs and needed a controller and these where, well, cheap! I'm Software Architect by trade but never got into the "electrical" side of things so was dreading that part. Anyway, had a couple hours on Sunday and decided to download the Arduino IDE. Got that running, plugged in the board and while it lit up, couldn't do anything after that. Swapped to another board. Still nothing. Couldn't imagine all being bad so changed USB port. Sure enough, boards apparently not happy on a USB 3.0 port. Downloaded "Blinky" and all was well. After about 3 more hours of tinkering, I now have some awesome looking "twinkling" XMAS lights that randomly assign colors (avoiding whites and grays) and then randomly assign blink durations. I would prefer non-diffused lenses, but not sure that exists, but the affect is awesome. Now to set up a pink palette for Valentine's day, a green palette for St. Patrick's day, something for Cinco de Mayo and ... !

I bought these to use in an LED controller project, and they worked well enough I'll probably end up buying more. I did end up frying one of them, but that was entirely down to user error.

Overall, for a cheap Nano clone from China. These work fine for simple projects one wants to do. You just have to make sure you download the correct drivers to let the IDE talk to it. Google CH340G drivers and download that to get it working, the Arduino Nano drivers wont work by default.

Love how small these are. Punched into a small breadboard you can do a lot with these. I'm very new to arduino, and i was initially very frustrated cuz you can't just select "arduino nano" in the arduino IDE. It won't talk to this board. See the QUESTIONS section where some nice person showed how to download a 3rd party driver that will get your arduino IDE "BOARDS" section to list "atmel atmega 328p Xplained mini" and then it worked great.

So unlike other reviewers here, I had no issues connecting these to a PC once you add and select "Atmel atmega328pb Xplained mini" in the Arduino IDE's board manager. HOWEVER, After only 12 hours of running a simple program, one board died and refused to connect through USB. Ok no big deal. I replaced it with one of the other boards just to find it was sucking up 152mA of current just sitting idle with nothing connected, killing the battery I had it running off of in just a couple days and getting worryingly hot. I replaced it with the final board but I don't have high hopes for it.

I rated this one only three stars, as one of the modules did not work. It took a little while to figure out why we kept getting an error, but after trying one of the other modules and it worked, we deducted that was the issue. The other two are working well and as expected.

Work great, great value for the money, and I've had fun using them for projects. You can't upload sketches to them though until you change your processor to the "(Old Bootloader)" option in the IED though! So be advised.

The quality of these boards are not very good. Only 2 of the 3 boards worked, and I had to install bootloaders to the 2 boards that worked. I could easily see someone new to Arduino thinking that they’re defective and throwing the boards out.