Electronics > Beginners

The "I made this!" thread - Beginners achievements with pride.

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llkiwi2006:
First time designing a PCB. Finally received it after some shipping mishaps. First thing I noticed: I got the silkscreen labels GND and 3V3 the wrong way round ...  |O  I hope permanent markers work on solder mask. :-DD

newbrain:

--- Quote from: paulca on February 23, 2018, 07:48:39 pm ---Blinky .... Wot no Arduino!

--- End quote ---
Neat idea. I always found the Arduino HW horribly overpriced. And the SW underwhelming (libraries and IDE).
So I did the same as you (about one year ago).


WRT yours, I've got headers and an user LED and button, plus Zener diodes and resistors for V-USB (with jumpers to free the pins).


And my naughty bits are nicer than yours :P

paulca:

--- Quote from: newbrain on February 23, 2018, 08:15:20 pm ---
--- Quote from: paulca on February 23, 2018, 07:48:39 pm ---Blinky .... Wot no Arduino!

--- End quote ---
Neat idea. I always found the Arduino HW horribly overpriced. And the SW underwhelming (libraries and IDE).
So I did the same as you (about one year ago).

--- End quote ---

Let's be fair the Arduino is not overpriced for what it is.  It provides an amazing access point into digital electronics without which the digital 'gadget' space or maker space would probably not be anything like what it is today.

It allows people to actually do constructive things without learning the datasheet version of the micro-controller.  It makes it a tool and a powerful one.  The odd thing is when you look at Arduino tutorials, they are all solving a problem and are practicals, in that sense they tell you "what" to do to achieve something.  The datasheet only tells you what you 'can' do and nothing of how you solve any problem.

That's worth a fiver!

Our experiments have been to explore just how much the Arduino actually does to help people "get stuff working" which is really all they... we care about.

chris_leyson:
@paulca Totally agree, for what you get I think the price is very fair, I recently gave up trying to write code for a PIC24 and found I could get things done tens times faster with a UNO and the Arduino compiler. A PIC24 processor was a bit of overkill whereas an ATMega328 did the job nicely. I haven't used an Atmel processor in a long time but going through the datasheets I now prefer them over PICs. The other advantage of AVR over PIC is that I get them in much smaller QFN packages if I'm really stuck for space.

There are a lot of very good Arduino tutorials and libraries and adding on your own hardware is easy. To be honest I've been far too sceptical about the Arduino platform for far too long and now that I've been playing with them I really like them.

KL27x:

--- Quote ---and a stepup boost converter to take the 3.7V LIPO output up to around 8.2V.  It turns out there's room for all that inside the case.  Everyone who does this does it a bit differently, but the pics below show where I put things, and how I connected them.
--- End quote ---
That is a fun project, for sure.

I did something similar with a pocket scope. If you examine the PCB for awhile, maybe you can figure out where/what are the other power rails. Surely, most of the power drawn in this scope is either 3.3V or 5V. You could potentially increase your battery life by using dedicated boost for the 9V rail, and a second circuit connected directly to the main rail. For instance, on my particular pocket scope the 5V rail was achieved with a linear regulator, so that extra 4V would be a complete waste. I removed the 7805 from the board, entirely.

Also, you might examine the input protection on the 9V input. There may be a diode drop you could bypass.   

I have to admit I have no use for a pocket scope, though. I have a hard enough time using a real scope with real controls. These pocket scope have to come along a bit further for me to be able to do anything with them. :)

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