LEAP#178 making a 7-segment LED PCB
My version of the second project from the KiCad like a Pro course (the first was an nRF24 breakout board).
The board combines a common-cathode 7-segment display with a shift register and current-limiting resistors. Nothing earth-shattering, but a good little KiCad exercise. I recently got the boards back from OSH Park, and they work just fine!
As always, all notes, schematics and code (including the KiCad project) are in the Little Arduino Projects repo on GitHub.
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LEAP#188 read/write AT24C02 external EEPROM
The AT24C02 is from Atmel's line of serial EEPROM chips with a whopping capacity of 2K! (256 x 8) That's not a whole lot more than the onboard EEPROM in an Arduino, but it does have the advantage of being external:
- it can stay in-situ even if the microcontroller disappears/gets exchanged
- multiple devices can share access
As always, all notes, schematics and code are in the Little Arduino Projects repo on GitHub.
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LEAP#187 nRF24L01+ Ping Pong
So now I have my nRF24 breakout boards back from OSH Park, time to try them out.
This is a simple script that runs on two Arduinos. They bounce messages back and forth over 2.4GHz using the nRF24L01+ modules, flashing their LEDs when messages successfully handled. Sweet, and the breakout boards work just fine.
As always, all notes, schematics and code are in the Little Arduino Projects repo on GitHub.
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LEAP#176 nRF24 Breakout Board
So recently I've been intrigued by small-batch PCB fab services, like OSH Park. Like the ready supply of components from various online sellers, it's amazing how cheap you can get boards made over the net these days. How do they do it? As I learned in this hardware hangout, there are some neat tricks done behind the scenes to aggregate small orders into full panels sent to a fab.
But to get PCBs made, you need to be able to drive an EDA tool like KiCad. KiCad's a beautiful open source tool, but it is quite idiosyncratic. In some spare time, I dived into the KiCad like a Pro course and found it an excellent leg-up on the process.
The nRF24 breakout board (below) is just the first trivial exercise from the course. But it will come in handy - I have a batch of nRF24's lying around that I've been planning to experiment with, and the breakout board will be quite handy for that.
I just received my boards from OSH Park (1 month from order to delivery in Singapore - not bad, especially for $4.80 all-in). Very impressed with the board quality. Not so much with the board design! A few things I can see could be easily improved, but that's my fault (see my notes). But they do work!
As always, all notes, schematics and code (including the KiCad project) are in the Little Arduino Projects repo on GitHub.
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