They seem very cheap but I feel sure there must be a catch. I only want something for the occasional small hobby project, so as long as it works, price is the most important thing.
So just wondering if anyone had seen/used anything like this as I'm a bit suspicious!
I have a project in mind to make eventually but my electronics until now had been entirely confined to through the hole breadboards and plug in wires. I'd done some microcontroller stuff using an mbed but nothing too complex. I decided that learning circuit design, verilog, kicad, getting a pcb manufactures and soldering really small components was too much to learn all at once.
I got a dangerous prototypes cpdl board and have been playing with that but decided to make my own simpler one just as a learning excercise...
So I designed a little CPLD breakout board in kicad, added a button for testing, and 4 LEDs and a 1.8v regulator for power and sent it to itead to manufacture for me. I got it back today and amazingly I managed to solder it all sucessfully, and *it all works*. The board is full of flaws. The silkscreen is awful and missing most of the useful information. One of my connectors has soldermask on the side I wanted to solder it (but not the other so it's still usable thankfully). Several of the components are not the right size of the components. But luckily I could still solder them badly :)
I've managed to program the CPLD using the jtag pins I put on, and it works fine :)
So, many mistakes and it's not a good board. But I've learned so much, and managed to get a working board so I'm pretty happy. Mostly posting this to point out that getting a board made and soldering small components isn't as hard as I thought it would be :) [attachment=0]
Probably the simplest build every posted here, but as Dangerous Prototypes kindly sent me the PCB I thought I'd show I've made use of it and thank DP for the board :) I chose this board because I was thinking of using the part in a future circuit and figured this was a good way to make sure I understood it first.
I'm trying to communicate with it using SPI from my mbed. I seem to be able to read and write the config byte but so far not the actual data bytes, but it seems likely this is just an issue with my program.
Not the world's best photograph unfortunately but as it's so simple there isn't much to see anyway. All the pins connected fine and there were no short circuits, but on such a simple build I wouldn't have expected any! [attachment=0]
