Looks like Itead is trying to get the Arduino clone price way down. They have setup an Indiegogo canpaign that has prices a low as $5 per board. The individual $5 boards have gone but you can still get shipped boards for $8 or 3 boards for $20. When you consider shipping is included in this the price is rock bottom. Itead is based in Shenzhen, China which is the land of cheap electronics manufacturing and cheap worldwide shipping so it makes sense that they could bring us a price like this! Itead is a reputable company, I have ordered boards and a few other items from them over time so not to worry about them taking your money and running. One thing I thought was a bit strange though is that there is no warranty on the boards. They say that they are made, programmed and have all of the ports tested to ensure the board is fully functional so I guess they just don’t want 10% of people ordering, hooking something up wrong, blow up the board and then want a new one. You can read through the Indiegogo canpaign to see how they reduced the cost of the device without removing functionality by doing things like using the CP2102 USB to Serial chip instead of the typical ATmega16U2 microcontroller. The main controller is a LGT8F88A which isn’t as powerful as the ATmega328 but will probably handle most of your projects.
“Summary
- Microcontroller: LGT8F88A
- Operating Voltage: 5V / 3.3V
- Input Voltage (recommended): 7-20V
- Input Voltage (limits): 7-24V
- Digital I/O Pins14 (of which 6 provide PWM output)
- Analog Input Pins6
- DC Current per I/O Pin80 mA
- DC Current for 3.3V power supply 250 mA
- Flash Memory 8Kbyte of which 0.7KB used by bootloader
- SRAM 1 KB
- EEPROM 504Byte
- Clock Speed 16 MHz”