Arm board small enough to fit inside any USB port

By Jean-Jacques DeLisle, contributing writer

The world that we live in is full of technological prototyping and robotic hobbyists, which inherently makes programmable development boards a highly essential tool. Used mainly to run custom software programs and to control various electronic devices, these development boards come in all shapes and sizes. Traditional boards are relatively bulky, like the original Arduino, but as technology continues to advance, they have become increasingly smaller and packed with even more features. Some CRM boards have even been constructed to be sown straight into clothing. Now the company Sutajio Ko-usagi  proposes a smaller, yet genuinely innovative, board called the Tomu Arm board.

After successfully crowdsourcing their new development board on the website Crowd Supply, Sutajio Ko-usagi’s Tomu Arm board may not be the smallest development board ever created, but it does have its own creative claim to fame. The Tomu Arm board is the first programmable development board designed to fit directly into any USB port with only a tiny and insignificant portion poking out. It also features two buttons and two LEDs that can be programmed to control electronics or functions that work in unison with an existing computer.

A close-up of the new Tomu Arm board. Image source: crowdsupply.com.

What’s more, the Tumo Arm has the ability to be used as a Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) token, which supports a two-factor authentication (2FA) and can log into compatible online services. It allows you to access your laptop or Facebook, for example, with just a simple touch of one of the Tomu buttons, avoiding the annoying SMS code authenticator. It’s an extremely useful feature if you have various websites that you have to log into often.

In the aspect of robotics, this new Arm board also has some interesting applications in store. The Tomu board can be used in specially crafted robots that normal development boards might not fit into. Because they have the ability to plug into a USB port, they would be virtually interchangeable if using multiple boards. This means that you could routinely switch out the development board on a project as you develop it, making it much easier to test various bits of code without the usual hassle. This feature also allows developers to swap out programming between various devices with greater ease than was ever possible before.

In its entirety, the Tomu Arm board is just a really neat and practical development board. USBs are integrated into basically all of our technological devices today, and having the ability to easily interface a development board with an empty USB port is one of those things that someone should have developed a long time ago. It is simple and easy, with a uniquely useful quality of fitting in some situations where nothing else would. The Tomu Arm board is a step in the right direction, and we hope to see more tech like it in the future.