Matseng built a USB capable AVR MCU breakout board from a free xQFP PCB.
If you build a free PCB we’ll send you another one! Blog about it, post a picture on Flicker, whatever – we’ll send you a coupon code for the free PCB drawer.
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I freely admit that this is a butt-ugly build. But it does it’s jobs quite well. It’s nice to have all the basic necessities like usb connector, crystal, decoupling capacitors and 3.3 volt vreg already in place for a quick hack.
Wow that is some creative soldering!
Luckily the 0.8mm pitch of the breakout board was ok for the SMD USB connector and the header vias at 0.1″ pitch is perfect for soldering 0805 SMD parts between the pads.
The 3.3 smd vreg was fitting just so-and-so.
All the GND and VCC connections are at the back of the pcb with some additional decoupling caps.
I really like the individual milled pin sockets. Where do you buy those?
You break them out of the plastic headers :)
I thought so. The photos seem to show evidence of some damage during this process. I have a feeling, though, that somewhere these things are sold individually, thus saving a few plastic trees.
Right. They are from an my stash of old wirewrap sockets like the one at http://www.positiveoffset.com/Parts/8-pin-wire-wrap-socket.jpg
I haven’t been wirewrapping anything the last 15 years or so, but I still use the wire for making corrections on pcb’s.
Some of the headers got a bit squashed during extraction, but they’re still usable.
Same here. I think I still have a wire-wrap tool, but the wire itself has been dedicated to “white wire” corrections of late.