Under $3 Chinese Arduino UNO compatible board

With UNO compatible boards selling for under $3 on AliExpress, I decided to order one.  Some people might think you're only going to get cheap crap for that price, but in some ways it is even better than the original Arduino UNO R3.

Some boards can be found with a microUSB connector, but I prefer the full-size connector since it is much more robust, and I have half a drawer full of the old cables with no more use for them.   One thing that could be better on the board is the choice of USB-ttl chip.  It uses the CH340G chip, which, depending on your OS, can be problematic when it comes to drivers.  Prolific and FTDI have both done some nasty things with their drivers to deal with clone chips, so I wouldn't recommend either of them.  The Silicon Labs CP2102 would probably be my first choice.

The board arrived with the female headers and ICSP header already soldered on.  The vendor could have done a better job with the packing, as the ICSP header pins were bent (though easily straightened out).  The red power LED, like many other boards I've seen, is a little bright for my liking.  It uses a 1K SMD current limiting resistor, which I may replace if it gets too annoying.

There's a part by the ICSP header that I haven't been able to identify, that looks like some kind of diode.  It is in parallel with the adjacent 10K reset pullup resistor.  If anyone knows what it is, drop a line in the comments.  The board uses a 16Mhz SMD resonator to clock the ATmega328p, and strangely also has a couple of (22pf?) loading capacitors.  While crystal oscillators usually require loading capacitors, ceramic resonators do not.  A quick frequency check by toggling a pin at 2Hz confirmed it is clocked slow.  With the frequency counter on my multimeter I measured 1.984Hz, or 0.8% slow.

To make a more exact frequency measurement, I used my Rigol 1054z to probe the oscillator pins, and measured 15.8537, or 0.9% slow.  I then decided to remove the caps.  I have a hot air gun, but was concerned the heat could damage the SMD oscillator.  Instead I used the 2 soldering-iron technique to heat both ends of the SMD capacitors and remove them.  With the caps removed, the frequency measured 15.9410Mhz, or 0.4% slow, within the +- 0.5% typical rating of ceramic resonators.

I think the board is well worth 268c price, for someone starting out with AVR MCUs I think one of the Nano clones is a better idea.  For less than $2 you get a board that is simpler to use with a breadboard than a full-size UNO.