I’ve just finalised my ‘dreamer1’ module design and am sending it to fab today. The motivation behind this was to create a low-cost way ( compared to the Microchip Dev board ) that was easy to prototype conceptual ideas, and or make one-off widgets with. It’s not something I would contemplate making lots of devices with.
The PCB is 43 x 26mm, and the two rows of headers are aligned on a .1" ( 2.54mm ) pitch so it could be plugged into a breadboard.
Its designed to be powered from USB, but you can feed power to it via the header pins, or the BAT pin. It will be possible to program it using the standard ICSP programmer pins, but also via a USB bootloader. There are a reset and user button, two dip switches, and two LEDs onboard. A number of GPIO pins, Serial RX/TX and I2C are taken to the header.
This is largely based on the microchip reference design, however, I have modified it to use 0402 parts as the smallest part size so it is a little more friendly for assembly. The PCB requires some micro vias and a specific stack, which does, unfortunately, drive the cost up a little, but there’s really no way around it.
The design files ( Altium ) are available on GitHub. There is a pdf of the schematic as well.
https://github.com/mrpackethead/dreamer1At present, I’m intending to make 10 of these and see how they go. While I do manufacture electronics, I can’t’ see this being something I’d like to make for sale, as these kinds of things are commoditized already and its a race to the bottom in pricing. If they cost 50c more than the cost of the parts, folks would complain they are too expensive. None the less they are useful to me, and if its useful to someone else then that would be good. I need to do an itemised BOM and work out exactly how much these will cost to make at 10up, and when I do, I’ll add the info to the repo. My educated guestimate is s that including PCB, it would cost around USD$300 to make 10 buying parts from Digikey / Mouser or similar and a PCB from a Chinese PCB shop. doing it at 1000up it should get down to under $10 of parts.
Already have software that does some basic stuff and will let you attach to the things network.