While designing a PCB for a project, I wanted to use a all surface mounted components as to not leave exposed soldered pins on the backside of the board, which doubles as the back of the project enclosure.

Searching for a SMD uC to be the brains; I learned of the new programming interfaced used by Microchip’s updated ATTINY family. Seems after Atmel was purchased a few years ago, a lot of work is going into revamping the Tiny family, which is amazing news for those projects in which a ATmega would be overkill.

This board was created using the footprint of a ATTINY406-SN, which is a bit larger than the uC I plan to use, but I figured I was only testing myself on getting it programmed, and once I did that, it was only good for prototyping and experiments. So no harm in a few extra pins.

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