We’ve seen credit card-sized computers before, but [Kn/vD] shows us a PIC18-based computer with 9 components that is only 2mm thick! With 13K of RAM and 128K of flash, you can’t do much with it, but a built-in BASIC interpreter can use half the flash like a disk drive and operate with the 20×4 LCD display and the PCB touch-panel keyboard.
If you count the PCB and the battery, there are actually 11 components. The schematic is online, but we didn’t see the files for the PCB or the interpreter yet, but it sounds like they are forthcoming. Meanwhile, we wonder if anyone is up to the challenge of going even thinner.
What’s even more interesting, though, is that the only reason there are 11 components is the need for decoupling capacitors and the battery along with a physical reset switch. All the real functions are in the CPU and the LCD display. The PCB provides the switches and we wonder if a different layout could have offered the
[Kn/Vd] loves small computers. There are plans for a few other versions of the board with AVR and PIC24 processors. The last time we saw a tiny module from [Kn/vD] it ran C. If you check out other Hackaday.io projects on the account, there are several tiny computers there. If you want a business card that can run Linux, you might need to go a little bit thicker.
