Lumen Electronic Jewelry

We love PCBs, so we were excited to see this beautiful circuitry from Lumen Electronic Jewelry:

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Fashion Gets Geeky

Lumen is the creation of Robin and Marty Lawson in Madison, Wisconsin:

We’re life-long tinkerers, siblings, and fourth generation mechanical engineers.

They’ve designed soldering kits for all levels: beginner, intermediate, and advanced surface mount soldering.  This heart is an example of an intermediate kit:

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Lumen also makes beautiful fully-assembled LED jewelry:

Solar powered twinkling LED jewelry. No batteries, hours of blinky.

We particularly like this twinkling fiberglass cephalopod:

Blinky Octopus Necklace

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Each octopus has 16 amber LED lights throughout the arms connected to 12 tiny solar cells. So your necklace will charge and blink all on its own, no batteries required.

Robin tells me that they use Free PCB for layout:

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Robin informed me that they laser their own stencils out of thin mylar sheets at their local Makerspace, Sector 67:

Robin explains that afterwards they clean the boards in an orange -based degreaser then seal in a ResinLab epoxy:
It is expensive but has a long working life, excellent hardness and optical clarity, as well as UV resistance to yellowing.
P.S. Here’s an insightful talk that Robin gave at TEDxMadison last year:
Lumen Electronic Jewelry

SMS for Orange Pi and Raspberry Pi

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Knudt designed this board to connect an inexpensive dual-band GSM module with to an Orange Pi or Raspberry Pi:

SMS for Orange Pi / Raspberry Pi

The config files and EAGLE design files can be downloaded from the Hackaday.io project:

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SMS for Orange Pi and Raspberry Pi

Ethernet PHY for Teensy 3.5 and 3.6

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Paul Stoffregen of PJRC designed this shield as a Kickstarter reward earlier this year:

Ethernet Shield for Teensy 3.5 and 3.6

Please understand this shield has very limited software support at this time. However, Manitou’s early benchmarks show excellent performance we can someday hope to achieve as the software matures.

PaulStoffregen has shared the board on OSH Park:

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Order from OSH Park

The source code is available on GitHub:

images PaulStoffregen/k66_ethernet

 

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Bill of Materials:

Qty  Part                               Digikey
---  ----                               -------
1    LAN8720A                           LAN8720A-CP-CT-ND
1    CAT811T                            CAT811TTBI-GT3OSCT-ND
1    Crystal, 25 MHz                    535-13419-1-ND
1    Transformer, Pulse H1102FNL        553-2204-1-ND
1    Connector, RJ45                    A102068CT-ND
1    Capacitor, 1nF, 2000V              709-1036-1-ND
2    Capacitor, 33pF                    490-5936-1-ND
1    Capacitor, 470pF                   490-1297-1-ND
3    Capacitor, 10nF                    445-1260-1-ND
1    Capacitor, 22nF                    490-8022-1-ND
3    Capacitor, 1uF                     399-5090-1-ND
1    Resistor, 33, 1%                   311-33.0LRCT-ND
4    Resistor, 49.9, 1%                 RMCF0402FT49R9CT-ND
4    Resistor, 75, 1%                   RHM75.0HCT-ND
2    Resistor, 330, 1%                  311-330LRCT-ND
1    Resistor, 1.5K, 1%                 311-1.50KLRCT-ND
2    Resistor, 12.1K, 1%                P12.1KLCT-ND
1    Inductor, Ferrite bead             553-2387-1-ND
2    LED, Green                         475-1410-1-ND
Ethernet PHY for Teensy 3.5 and 3.6

MicroUSB powered ESP8266 Oled Board

logo.jpgMike Rankin created this board with a tiny OLED display controlled by an ESP8266:

MicroUSB powered ESP8266 OLED Board

I created this design as a challenge to make a design under 1″ x 1″ in size.

 The hardware is an ESP-01 ESP8266 Wifi module, linear power supply, microUSB connector and a few oled display parts.

The design files and source code are available on GitHub:

imagesESP8266_OLED

 

Here is a video of the assembly and operation:

miker has shared the board on OSH Park:

ESP8266 OLED Board Rev3

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Order from OSH Park

MicroUSB powered ESP8266 Oled Board

Olimex: ESP32-WROOM-32 WiFi/Bluetooth module is in stock

ESP32-WROOM-32 modules are in stock now! Again these are from the very first lot and with limited supply. To give chances to more developers to try them we will not allow more than 3 modules per order. This module is good only if you develop your own board. For these who are not good with […]

via ESP32-WROOM-32 WiFi/Bluetooth module is in stock! — olimex

Olimex: ESP32-WROOM-32 WiFi/Bluetooth module is in stock

OpenFixture Takes the Pain Out of Pogo Pins

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Hackaday reports:

OpenFixture Takes the Pain Out of Pogo Pins

[Elliot] wrote in with his OpenFixture model for OpenSCAD. It’s awesome because it takes a small problem, that nonetheless could consume an entire day, and solves it neatly. And that problem is making jigs to test assembled electrical products: a PCB test fixture.

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In the PCB design software, you simply note down the locations of the test points and feed these into the OpenSCAD model.  [Elliot] shows you exactly how to do it using KiCAD. There are a few more parameters of the model that you can tweak to match your particulars, but you should have a DXF outline for a test jig in short order. Cut that out, assemble, and test.

 

OpenFixture Takes the Pain Out of Pogo Pins

OnChip Open Source RISC-V microcontroller at ORCONF 2016

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ORCONF 2016 was held earlier this month in Bologna, Italy:

ORCONF is an open source digital design and embedded systems conference, covering areas of electronics from the transistor level up to Linux user space and beyond. Expect presentations and discussion on free and open source IP projects, implementations on FPGA and in silicon, verification, EDA tools, licensing and embedded software, to name a few.

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Begun as the annual OpenRISC developers and users conference, it has become a broad open source digital design-oriented event and is supported by FOSSi – the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation.

Elkim Roa spoke about OnChip, an Open Source silicon microcontroller, designed by his research group at UIS (Universidad Industrial de Santander):

Fully-tested 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller in 130nm

The slides are available as PDF on GitHub:

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OnChipUIS has several repos on GitHub related to the project including:

mriscvA 32-bit Microcontroller featuring a RISC-V core

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OnChip Open Source RISC-V microcontroller at ORCONF 2016

The Spark Gap talks Open Hardware Summit

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We’re big fans of podcasts about electronics and embedded systems like The Amp Hourembedded.fm and The Spark Gap podcast.   (Please let us know in the comments of other shows we should check out)

In the latest Spark Gap episode, Karl and Corey talk about their trip to Portland for the 2016 Open Hardware Summit:

The Spark Gap Podcast – Episode 49

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Our favorite past episodes include the two-episode discussion of PCB design:

We also enjoyed when Karl and Corey were joined by James Lewis of Kemet Electronics to talk about capacitors.

The Spark Gap talks Open Hardware Summit