Mats continues his challenge of designing one PCB every week. In week 20 he came up with LEDger Led (polarity) tester: Everytime I solder a SMD LED on a pcb I have to turn on one of my multimeters and flip it over to diode-test mode and then probe the SMD LED to see which […]
Category Archives: project logs
PCB a Week 19: SD Card Breakout for breadboards
Mats continues his challenge of designing one PCB every week. In week 19 he came up with breakout board for micro SD cards: This weeks PAW is just a breakout board for micro SD cards. There’s a number of boards like this on the market already, but they are kinda expensive and I like doing […]
COLDES1 (COLlaborative DESign) – LCD 2 TV Out
Mats writes: Most of the PAWs are rather simple but I’d like to to some more involved/advanced projects every now and then. So I would like to propose a new series of projects – the COLDES – Collaborative Design. Where we are a few that uses our shared time and experiences to come up with […]
BB Prince free kit build
FourthDr built this BB Prince he won in Mats’ giveaway contest. It’s a small multi-purpose utility for your solderless breadboard: Anyone else receive their kit? I’m going to use mine with some minimal Arduino circuits on my bread board along with the crystal module you made. Via the forum.
Blinking earring project
Bertho posted his blinking earring in the project log forum: An idea of a blinking earring was born while talking at the local hackerspace. Inger was playing with harddisk parts and wanted to make blinking earrings. She has been doing workshops making jewelry from old computer parts (very, very nice; she is not an engineer/technician). […]
PCB a Week 18: SMD Practice Skull
Mats continues his challenge of designing one PCB every week. In week 18 he came up with SMD Practice Skull: I while ago I chatted with (Re:load) Nick Johnson about making some simple pcbs for learning how to solder smd parts. This is one of the boards that I came up with. All parts are […]
PCB a Week 17: USB Spypow
Mats continues his challenge of designing one PCB every week. In week 17 he came up with USB Spypow, it displays the actual charge rates of a USB device: Yesterday I saw the “The Practical Meter” on Kickstarter – a small unit that is placed inline with the USB when charging your phone and shows the […]
PCB a Week 16: TripleButts
Mats continues his challenge of designing one PCB every week. In week 16 he came up with three different breadboard breakout boards each holding 12 tactile switches, the TripleButts: Board #1 is the Full version. All the twelve switches are connected separately to their own pins on the headers. Twelve pins on the top and […]
Nomech mini, a 4×4 capacitive touch button grid
Kasbah posted an update on his Nomech mini project we covered we previously: So after some wrangling with the code I got the charging and discharging of the sampling capacitor working. CH1 is the slope pin which is used for discharging the sample capacitor (and then measuring the time it takes to discharge ). These […]
Dot-Matrix MSP430 alarm clock
Markus Gritsch shows off his Dot-Matrix MSP430 alarm clock. Via the project log forum.
PCB a Week 15: Twittorama
Mats continues his challenge of designing one PCB every week. In week 15 he came up with 14 segment display- Twittorama: Displaying tweets isn’t anything new, but most I’ve seen have a small display and scrolls the tweets. I want the full 140 characters to be visible simultaneously. So I put 10 of the displays (20 […]
Raspberry Pi level shifters and monitoring
Stuff4Pi posted his ConvertPi, a Raspberry Pi GPIO full level converter & monitoring, in the project log forum: I would like to introduce my first Raspberry board: a GPIO bi-directional level translator (3.3V <-> 5V): – This is an in-between expansion board that you plug in the RPi P1 connector which gives a bi-directional level […]
BLiVIT project update
Asgard posted an update on his power charger and supply regulator project we covered previously, the BLiVIT: Testing continues. I have validated the power flow switches and the battery charger/management.The measured idle current draw from the Li+ cell is 23.4uA. With the Powah-1 module and the 10Meg load resistance inherent in my scope the current […]
PCB a Week 14: Hello-ot
Mats continues his challenge of designing one PCB every week. In week 14 he came up with Hello-ot: Being able to change between, black (off), red, green and yellow (quickly alternating red/green) my plan was to make an Reversi/Othello game with them and have it all fit on a 10×10 cm pcb. For selecting which […]
PAW13 Sniff-A-Lot for Bus Pirate update
Mats posted an update on his Sniff-A-Lot for Bus Pirate: So, I found my Bus Pirate and then made a RS-232 breakout cable with a male/female DB9 and tapped off rx/tx from pin 2/3 and gnd from pin 5. And hooked it up to the first serial device I had in reach – a magstrip […]
PCB a Week 13: Sniff-A-Lot for BusPirate
Mats continues his challenge of designing one PCB every week. In week 13 he came up with Sniff-A-Lot, a small addon board to the Bus Pirate: As PAW13 I did a small addon board to the Bus Pirate. Sniff-A-Lot combines both TX and RX of a serial port into one signal that can be monitored […]
DMX lighting sequence player
Paul over at Dorkbotpdx has written an article about his DMX lighting sequence player: Portland CORE effigy at Burning Man will be using DMX controlled lighting this year. At least that’s the plan, but a low-cost and low-power way to automatically play the lighting sequence (without a PC) is needed. Here’s a little board I […]
WiFi DipCortex
Carl over at SolderSplash Labs posted his WiFi DipCortex in the project log forum: Just completed another prototype, this one is a variation on our DipCortex, a 40 pin dip cortex M3 board. It adds WiFi using the popular CC3000MOD, giving you a tiny breadboard-able WiFi dev board. Because of it’s size and the thermal […]
Mini 7-segment clock project
Kevin Rye posted his Mini 7-segment clock in the project log forum: I finally got in my OSH Park PCBs for my mini 7-segment clock. It’s using the DP5050 PCB layout. I used the SparkFun 7-seg display, but unfortunately, they screwed up the pinouts on the footprint and pins 10 and 12 are pin-swapped. I […]
Unicorn Buster, an auto locker for your workstation
Stewartallen has been working on this workstation auto lock project, the Unicorn Buster: What is the Unicorn Buster? It’s an auto locker for your workstation/laptop, keep the key-fob on your person and if you walk away from your machine it’ll lock.