Arduino overclocked with liquid nitrogen

A modder named Michail recently snapped up some liquid nitrogen in Moscow and decided to try his hand at overclocking an Arduino with the LIN. As you can see in the video below, the Arduino’s temperature was brought down to a cool -196°C/-320°F as it hit speeds of 65.3MHz.

During the overclocking session, Michail ran several stability tests he designed specifically for the project to gauge if the ATmega was still working correctly, including SRAM read/write, flash read, arithmetic math and program flow test.

“The Arduino was externally clocked by a TTL-logic based square signal generator he designed, which can produce a clock between 16 and 100MHz,” the Hack A Day crew explained in a recent blog post about the project. “[As to] what happens to the different on-board components when cooled with LN2? Electrolytic capacitors becomes virtually non-existent, X7R capacitors’ impedance drop by 2/3, silicon diodes voltage drop increase by 50% and LED’s colors change.”

Michail said he overclocked the Arduino UNO (Atmel ATmega328P) to better understand how electronic equipment operates at cryogenic temperatures.

“[I was also] curious how much juice you can squeeze out of AVR if you push hard enough This also produced some results relevant to desktop processors overclocking with liquid nitrogen cooling,” Michail noted. “[Remember], overclocking microcontrollers with liquid nitrogen cooling promises to be harder, than overclocking desktop processors. Luckily for me, all [the] problems were sorted out at the end.”

Interested in learning more? Additional photos and data are available here on Michail’s official website.