We are big fans of Hackaday’s project website Hackaday.io and are proud to see over 200 projects there have used OSH Park.

Please let us know in the comments section below if there are other Hackaday.io projects that should be added to the list.

If you are on Hackaday.io, then please follow our company profile that the wonderful Sophi Kravitz helped to create last week:

 

☠ Happy Hacking! ☠

Jeff Ciesielski is developing a BOM/Component manager for KiCad:

BOMs Away!

The goal of this app is to ease the BOM management burden on designers who choose to use Kicad for their layout and schematic capture needs, allowing for faster, easier data entry, and to provide a part database for re-use in future design

Features include:

• Self-curated component database
  • Simply enter a part’s manufacturer, supplier, manufacturer PN, and supplier PN then click ‘save to datastore’. Information is keyed off of component value and footprint, so future uses can simply use the part lookup button to retrieve the information. Multiple suppliers, manufacturers, and part numbers are supported.

• Like-Part consolidation
  • Everybody miskeys from time to time, this feature detects (to the best of its ability) components that are the same, but simply have mislabeled values. For example: (10K, 10k, 10 K) will be consolidated into a single value selectable by the user

• CSV Bom Export
  • Exports PCBNew style component agregate BOMs as CSV. Suitable for upload to digikey/mouser/octopart/etc

• KiCad Backpropegation
  • All changes can be saved back to KiCad Schematics

Eric Conner is developing an Arduino-based control system for building your own pinball machine:

The Pinduino Project

This is a dream that I have been working towards since 2012 […] I have finally found the time to complete it and have been progressing with leaps and bounds. Currently the project is 80% complete

Eric has thus far implemented:

• 64 switch inputs
• 64 lamp outputs
• 16 solenoid outputs
• 5 general illumination outputs
• 2 flipper outputs
• I/O Expansion port to add additional 16 solenoid outputs & flipper outputs

You can find design files and source code on GitHub and even contribute to the project:

EricConnerApps/Pinduino

 

eaconner has several shared projects on OSH Park including:

Pinduino Driver Board

Alex Albino of femto.io recently launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo for the successor to the 8-bit AVR powered Femtoduino:

FemtoUSB

A tiny, powerful Arduino compatible board

Features:

 

The FemtoUSB hardware design files:

 

The source code and configuration files of the Arduino Core for the FemtoUSB’s Atmel SAMD21 processor:

femtoio/ArduinoCore-atsamd21e18a

 

The MinnowBoard is an Open Source Hardware single board computer with dual core 64-bit Intel Atom processor:

The Embedded Linux Conference was last week in San Diego, and John Hawley and David Anders of Intel Open Source Technology Center displayed new MinnowBoard Lures (e.g. daughterboards) during the Technical Showcase:

The new 4-channel Relay Lure designed by Jose Navarro of Intel and made by OSH Park was click-clacking away:

The Relay Lure is designed for MinnowBoard MAX and MinnowBoard Turbot and connects to the Low Speed Expansion (LSE) header.  Features include:

• Rated ~6A, 110VAC / ~4A, 30VDC per channel
• Screw in block terminals
• Normally closed and normally open connections available
• GPIOs protected using optocouplers.
• Experimental header to connect HC-06 type Bluetooth modules.
• Licensed: CC BY-SA 3.0 US

The design files are hosted on GitHub:

MinnowBoard/lure-lse-relay

The board is shared on OSH Park:

Relay Lure for MinnowBoard MAX / Turbot

 

Open Panzer is a community project developing Open Source hardware and software for the RC tanks:

Open Panzer TCB (Tank Control Board): highly-capable and very flexible control board designed specifically for RC model tanks, but also suitable for halftracks, cars, or even battleships.

The hardware is based on an ATmega 2560 processor and the firmware consists of an Arduino sketch as well as various C++ libraries.

 

The hardware design files are available on the Open Panzer Downloads page:

• Eagle Board and Schematic
• Printable Schematic
• Bill of Materials

 

OpenPanzer has shared several boards on OSH Park including:

Open Panzer TCB Mk1

Henrik Forstén built a board with an Atmel ARM processor in 217-ball BGA package using OSH Park and OSH Stencil:

Making embedded Linux computer

I wanted to try designing a board with BGA chips in it to see how hard soldering them could be. So I decided to design a small ARM embedded system that can run Linux. ARM processor that I decided to use was AT91SAM9N12 in a 217 ball LFBGA package, just because it was the cheapest ARM processor with memory management unit which is required to run Linux.

Ttl/sam_board

 

John Keefe writes about his experience building an Open Source data logger:

Make Every Week: Circuit Boards, For Reals

I always considered circuit boards like this something you bought, not something you made.  Not any more.  I actually helped to make the board in the picture above. And it was awesome fun.

The board is designed to monitor the conductivity (and, possibly, contamination) of water in lakes and streams, with the wonderful feature that it fits through the mouth of a regular water bottle. It’s called Riffle and it is the brainchild of Don Blair, who’s working with Public Lab and the MIT Center for Civic Media.

The Public Lab wiki explains Riffle stands for Remote Independent Friendly Field-Logger Electronics:

Riffle: open source data logger

 

We are working to develop an open source hardware datalogger that can be placed in the field for extended deployments and measure common water parameters like temperature, conductivity, depth, and turbidity.

 

The hardware design files hosted on GitHub:

Piotr Zapart of hexeguitar.com created this rotary encoder board with LED ring:

Mounting board for the Panasonic EVEP series rotary encoders equipped with I2C driven 16 LED ring.

LED driver is built around the MCP32017 16bit I2C IO expander. Up to 8 modules can be used on the same I2C bus.

hexeguitar has shared the board on OSH Park:

Encoder board

Here’s a video of the project in action:

bitknitting is automating the creation of a Bill of Materials (BoM) for Digi-Key from a Kicad project:

From Kicad to Digikey: Generating a BoM based on eeSchema

The goal of this post is to provide an overview of my MakeDigikeyBOM.py effort.  To do this, I will take a simple schematic created in Kicad.

 

Start of MakeDigikeyBoM Code Review: Walk Through of Block Diagram

The goal of this post is to start a code review MakeDigikeyBoM python project.  I’ll cover the block diagram I created to represent the “big picture”.

 

MakeDigikeyBOM Code Review: The Python Scripts

The goal of this post is to familiarize us with the structure and purpose of the MakeDigikeyBom Python package and individual modules.

 

Check out this on GitHub for the source code: